On-page SEO factors affecting rankings (Part 3)

Now that we’ve gone through all 5 on-page SEO contenders and their on-page SEO factors, let’s do a summary of findings and things to keep in mind when thinking about on-page SEO for your website.

On-page SEO – The Summary table

Here’s a summary table that combines WooRank score and a number of other key on-page SEO elements we talked about. Please note, That WooRank score is out of 100.

Scores for other elements are out of 10 and are very arbitrary (but I hope more or less accurate). At the bottom of the table I’m putting my numbers in based on how I would rank the sites :) Well, I’m not Google, but I am a person and websites should be built for people, not search engines.

Now, let’s look at some more general lessons from this series of articles about on-page SEO.

On-page SEO – The Verdict

So, what did we just find out that will help identify key elements of on-page SEO?

1. There are many on-page SEO factors that contribute to web page relevancy. There’s a few key SEO factors that affect your rankings more than other factors. Titles, headings, link anchors, image alts, etc. are among the most important ones.
2. Always remember that your website experience starts from a search listing. Landing on your site in step 2 or even 3. So, make sure you use unique and descriptive titles and promising descriptions on your pages.
3. Build your websites for people first, then for search engines. Make sure your landing page (the page that results in clicking on your Google listing) is clean and actually representative of your business. If you claim you’re a design shop, show it.
4. Although all 5 websites have relatively high WooRank score, there are things to improve on. Also, looking at score variation between the 5 sites, we see that there’s something else at play besides on-page SEO.

The fact that some of the most critical on-page SEO elements like canonical tagging, headings, image alts, etc. are being missed by top performers in “calgary web design” competition, suggests that either these are not as important to Google OR the rest of the sites perform even worse.

Next week I will do a similar exercise with off-page SEO and external factors affecting website rankings. In the meantime, feel free to follow me on Twitter where I share SEO things I find on the internet.

Related posts:

1. On-page SEO factors affecting rankings (Part 1)
2. On-page SEO factors affecting rankings (Part 2)
3. Executing social media, notes from event (part 1)