05. On-Page SEO

To rank your pages, Google will also take into account a set of “page experience signals.” These include (but are not limited to): These are problems that can be spotted on individual pages but usually need to be solved at the site level. Check out our guides to learn more:

Rich results are search results that give searchers extra information about a page, like product ratings or recipe details. Not every type of search is eligible to show rich results, but for those that are, rich results help drive extra clicks to your page. To be eligible for rich snippets, you need to apply a simple […]

Featured snippets are special search results that sit above the main organic results in a place known as “position zero”: In searches where Google thinks visitors will benefit from a short, direct answer, they’ll often choose an excerpt from a high-ranking page to show. Plenty of queries have a featured snippet, so it’s worth trying […]

Google’s quality rater guidelines encourage authors to demonstrate “EEAT” in their content: expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. These guidelines are used by Google’s quality raters, and although they’re not a direct ranking factor, they give a clear indication of the type of content Google aims to reward in its search results. You can emphasize your EEAT in a few different […]

You can often improve your ranking by filling any “content gaps” in your article: important information that other articles cover, but you don’t. Adding new sections to include this missing information can help you rank for extra long-tail keyword variations and improve your ranking for your primary keyword. In the image below, we can see an article […]

Images from your pages can rank in Google image search and send more traffic your way. You need to do three things to optimize them: You can use the Images report in Ahrefs’ Site Audit to check your site for images with missing alt text (and flag a host of other possible optimization opportunities, like oversized images):

Google says linking to other websites is a great way to provide value to your users External linking is also a good idea whenever you want to cite information from elsewhere on the web, or send the reader to an authoritative third-party source of information. We do this all the time on the Ahrefs blog: Over time, […]

If you have them, link to relevant pages on your website. Internal links help visitors navigate your website and increase the odds that they’ll find the information they need—but there are benefits for SEO too. Internal linking helps search engines find all the pages on your website, understand what each page is about (and how they relate to […]

It’s helpful to use a short, descriptive URL structure highlighting the core topic of the page. As Google explains in its SEO starter guide: “Parts of the URL can be displayed in search results as breadcrumbs, so users can also use the URLs to understand whether a result will be useful for them.” We recommend using your […]

Meta descriptions aren’t a ranking factor, but they can bring more clicks and traffic. This is because Google uses them for the descriptive snippet in the search results 37.22% of the time. The rest of the time, they use other content from the page. For that reason, there’s no ned to obsess over crafting perfect meta descriptions for […]