One of the most important factors of getting your website ranked in the search engines like Google and Bing is on page SEO.

This is the practice of setting your page out in a way a search engine will see your page is useful to visitors and can be understood in such a way the search engines can rank the page. The result of which is more relevant visitors to your website.

If you want your website pages to have a chance in ranking in the search engines you will need to understand on page SEO and follow best practices to better your chances. Luckily there are WordPress plugins that help you ensure your pages have what it takes to have good on page SEO.
2 of which are Yoast and Rank Math both have free and paid options available.

It is important to explain what a keyword, keyword phrase or target keyword is before we go any further as this term is referred to throughout this article.

What are SEO Keywords?

SEO keywords (also known as “keywords” or “keyphrases”) are terms added to online content in order to improve search engine rankings for those terms.
https://backlinko.com/hub/seo/seo-keywords

It’s what your potential customers will type into the search engine to find a website like yours. Keywords or keyword phrases are used to ‘target’ the topic of your web page. I.e. if your web page is about web design you would use keyword phrases like ‘web design’ to ‘target the page even more you might use keyword phrases such as ‘affordable web design’ fora page on low cost web design or ‘web design near me’ for a page about a local web design service.

So without messing about here are your 10 On Page SEO Tips to Rank on Google or other search engines. 

1. Keyword in title tag – Make sure you add your target keyword in the title tag of your page. The title tag is one of the first things that someone will see in the search results. Adding the target keyword at the start of the title tag helps your page to stand out to a potentially interested visitor. Your title tag can be up to 60 characters, with 50-60 characters being ideal.
   Here is an example of a search result for my website showing the title tag at the top.
2. Target keyword in first 100 words – Search engines want to work out what your page is about as soon as possible, your readers will want that as well. Have you ever come across a page after searching for something only to find it isn’t the exact information you’re looking for? You don’t hang around do you? You should add your target keyword into the first 100 words on your page or blog post. You can also add your target keyword a few more times naturally throughout your content. Don’t overdo this, as you’re not trying to completely fill your page full of the same words. For example, in a 3,000 word article, you wouldn’t want to use your target keyword more than 5-6 times.
3. SEO Friendly URLs – Make sure your pages and posts use simple SEO friendly URLs. include your keyword and keep the URL short to perform better in the search engines. For example if your target keyword was “dog training”, then your URL would be better as /dog-training/ rather than /learn-more-about-how-to-traing-your-dog/.
4. Unique Meta Descriptions – Okay, back to my example (below) Ensure that every page and post on your website has a well-written and unique meta description. These will be shown in the search engine results, as the descriptive text beneath the title of each result. Meta descriptions give you a perfect opportunity to encourage someone to click through to your page and read more of your content. You can use up to 160 characters here. One of the SEO Plugins will help you get this right. (you can see my target keyword in bold text in the example below)
5. Write for humans not search engines – Back in the day all you had to do to rank a page was add your keyword a many times as you could in as many places as you could and your page would rank. Those days are long gone.  Your content is going to be enjoyed by people, make sure they’re always considered first. Yes, there are tips and tricks you can use to help the search engines understand your content better, but you must write for humans. If your content is written purely for the search engines, it will usually be harder for a human to read. This causes them to quickly click back in their browser and visit your competitor instead.
6. Make your content engaging – We can quickly get tired when reading large passages of text. There’s nothing worse than seeing thousands of words of content on a screen, with no breaks, and it’s boring! Make sure you use pictures, diagrams and even video to break up your content. You want to get your visitors’ attention and keep them reading your page. This has the added benefit of increasing time on page, a metric that measures how long someone has stayed on a page after clicking through from the search results, this helps your ranking as well.
7. Consider search intent – Keyword research is key! Before you create any content you intend to target with a specific keyword, you need to do some keyword research to ensure the keyword you want to use is actually being searched for by people. Search Google for your selected keyword, what sort of results are showing for that keyword already? If none of the top 10 results in Google are blog articles, then the search intent suggests that people are not looking to read articles. Always make sure that the type of content you want to create is already ranking highly in the search engines!
8. Internal Linking – Internal linking is one of the most important parts of on page SEO. An internal link is a link that takes a user to another page or blog post on your own website. It’s perfect for linking them to further useful information on a particular topic. Every page or post of your website should have internal linking. This helps both your readers and the search engines.
9. Check out the competition – When you’re creating a new article and want to rank on the first page of the search results, check out the competition. One of the most important things that you should be looking at is how long is the content for the top 10 results. If the average number of words for the top 10 results is 1400, then you need to be writing at least the same amount of words in your article. It can make a big difference to the quality of your content and how the search engines rank it.
10. Make sure your website loads fast! – Not an obvious one but not so long ago Google made page load speed a thing and now ranks websites using this metric. Make sure your website loads quickly. Visitors will love you for it and you’ll be in favour with the search engines too. People are more fickle and impatient these days, they’re easily bored by slow websites. Aim for your site to load in under 2 seconds, ideally under 1 second. Run a speed test using GTMetrix. If the result is more than 2 seconds, your website needs optimising. If you want to run a page speed test on the whole of your website Experte.com has a tool that does just that!

There you go 10 tips to On Page SEO you can use to help rank your website, Oh and don’t forget one of those SEO Plugins for your WordPress Website either they help tremendously.