On-page SEO doesn’t have to be complicated. Many webmasters associate on-page SEO with coding and programming, but this isn’t the case at all, especially if you’re using a blogging platform like WordPress. To effectively optimize the pages on your site for search engines, you have to let search engines know what you want to rank high for – and you will have to tell them in a variety of different ways. Let’s not beat around the bush anymore – here are 6 on-page search engine optimization tips that you can’t miss. Note that some parts of the following tips may be a little focused to bloggers, but with a little creativity, can be used to boost the search engine rankings of any type of website.

1. Optimise your title tag

Your title tag is vitally important in terms of SEO. Don’t simply include your company’s name and leave it at that. Prioritise your main keyword at the start of the title tag and ensure that it reads naturally and doesn’t take up any more than 64-70 characters. Any longer than this, and Google will simply chop the end off.

2. Utilise your link text properly

The text that makes up a hyperlink is what tells Google what the target page is about. Want Google to associate a page with a specific term? Use that term in the anchor text of your hyperlinks and you’re half-way there. However, you need to make sure that the text reads naturally and won’t put off humans in favour of search engines. Remember your audience.

3. Remember the alt attributes!

Many people neglect alt attributes on images. Essentially, this text tells browsers what the picture is about, seeing as most are unable to read and decipher images. This is vital for W3C validity, but the real bonus is an SEO one. If your image is linked to another page, the alt text will act as the equivalent of anchor text in a text-based hyperlink. By utilising your keywords in the alt text, you can squeeze a little bit more SEO benefit out of your pages.

4. Keep your code clean and valid

Having code which is clean and structured and conforms to W3C standards will ensure that search engine spiders and browsers are able to read and navigate your site effectively, as well as being able to extract the relevant content from your site and discover its focus and meaning. Making life easier for Google will make life much easier for you, and you’ll see the benefit in your search engine rankings in no time.

5) Have A Good Navigational Structure

Having a good navigational structure makes you’re site… you guessed it, easy to navigate, but also helps search engines index your website’s content. There are many ways to improve your site’s structure.

Link to important pages within your navigation bar. You don’t have to link to every other page on your site from the navigation bar, but try to fit as many important links as you can. Be sure to use anchor text to target keywords. Your footer should contain links to more content and if you’re a blogger, you might be interested in a related posts plugin to increase internal links and have a good navigational structure. A great way to get all of your website content indexed by Google is submitting a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. There are many WordPress plugins available to do this, but I recommend Google XML Sitemaps.

6. Above all, keep the quality high

The temptation is always there to spam your pages in order to get the search engine benefit but make your site completely useless and unintelligible for human visitors. Think about it – what use is it being at the top of the search engines if your users can’t find their way around your site or work out what you’re trying to say from your jumble of heavily-SEO’d text? Keep your users at the front of your mind at all times, and search engines will follow.