In today’s digital landscape, user experience is king.
Google wants its users to have a stellar experience when they search for a business or website.
That’s why technical SEO has become an essential part of any site’s strategy.
On-page technical SEO optimizes your website so that users and search engines can easily understand what your site is about and how to navigate it.
This article covers 10 on-page technical SEO best practices you should be implementing if you want to boost your ranking in search engines.
Make your site faster with fast-loading pages.
Speed is a critical factor when it comes to SEO.
According to a survey by BrightEdge, over 50% of users expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less,
and 20% of users abandon a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
You can speed up your site by optimizing your images, minifying your code, and compressing your content.
To generate the full sitemap, Google needs to crawl your site completely.
If the speed of crawling is slow, the page indexing rate will be slow as well.
And slow indexing means slow growth of your site.
Make your site load faster with these on-page technical SEO best practices.
Enable Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a type of web page that was created by Google to make the internet faster.
AMP is predominantly used for news articles and blogs on websites like BuzzFeed, BBC, and TechCrunch.
AMP is designed to load quickly and provide an excellent user experience on mobile devices.
If you have an e-commerce site, you can also use AMP pages to increase your conversion rate.
For example, the clothing retailer ASOS implemented AMP to boost its sales.
AMP is an acronym for Accelerated Mobile Pages with Maps and Places.
AMP is an open-source initiative that also lets you put one map on each of your AMP pages.
Use schema.org metadata.
A significant portion of people use search engines to find products and services.
If your business sells products, you can increase the chances of being found by adding valid product metadata to your pages.
To do this, you can use a schema.org plugin or manually add schema.org metadata in your source code.
For example, you can add a restaurant’s menu, an event’s details, a musician’s biography, or a product’s description.
If your website sells products, you can implement a schema.org product citation to tell Google that you are selling a particular product.
This citation includes information such as the product name, price, image, and quantity.
The product citation is highly relevant to the product and can help you rank higher in the search engine results pages.
Use semantic HTML for easier crawling.
One of the on-page technical SEO best practices is using semantic HTML.
Semantic HTML means using HTML tags that describe the nature of their content.
For example, you should use strong> for bold text, em> for italicized text, ul> for a list, and ol> for numbers in a list.
You can also use header tags to mark up the content.
For example, when you are creating an About page, you should use a h1> tag for the page title and a h2> tag for the sub-headline.
When Google crawls your website, it uses the strong> and em> tags to determine the importance of a page.
Using semantic HTML makes it easier for Google to understand what your site is about.
Google also uses this information to determine how a page should rank in the search engine results pages.
Have a responsive site, and mark up your content for different screen sizes.
Responsive web design (RWD) is the most common technique for creating an adaptive website that is usable across a wide range of devices and screen sizes.
When you mark up your website’s content for different screen sizes, Google understands that your website is responsive.
You can use an RWD framework such as Bootstrap or Foundation.
These frameworks make it easy to add responsive functionality to your website.
Alternatively, you can use a content management system (CMS) with built-in responsive functionality, such as WordPress or Drupal.
Google recommends that you use a mobile-friendly method for marking up your content for different screen sizes.
Using the viewport meta> tag or the CSS device adaptation method is one way to do this.
Don’t use Flash.
Flash is a content management system (CMS) built on top of a programming language called ActionScript.
It has been used in many websites since the early days of the internet.
But now, Google considers Flash as a violation of its guideline.
Google’s bots can’t read the content in a Flash website without a significant effort.
So, you should not use Flash for creating a website.
In fact, Google penalizes a website for using Flash.
If you want to rank higher in the SERPs, you should avoid Flash. Instead, you can use HTML5.
Show your website’s location with geo-marking and have a sitemap.
When people search for a business or website, they want to know where the business is located.
You can show Google your business location by implementing geo-marking.
At the same time, you can create a sitemap that helps Google understand your website structure.
If you have a local business, geo-marking is especially important.
Google uses your location to show your business on a map.
It also uses your location to determine the language of your website and the search results you’ll appear in.
Google recommends using a sitemap for both your desktop and mobile website.
The sitemap tells Google about the important pages on your website and their hierarchy.
Conclusion
This article covers 7 on-page technical SEO best practices that will boost your rankings in search engines.
These include making your site faster with fast-loading pages, enabling Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), using schema.org metadata, using semantic HTML for easier crawling, having a responsive site, and marking up your content for different screen sizes.
You can also show your website’s location with geo-marking and have a sitemap.
You should also avoid Flash and show Google that you have created a mobile-friendly website.
Following these on-page technical SEO best practices will help you achieve higher rankings in search engines and increase organic traffic to your website.

Timothy Mbiti
I am an entrepreneur and co-founder at PicketMaze. I specialize in search engine optimization and digital marketing.