On-Page Optimization is a vital and integral aspect of the process to making a website more search engine friendly. It matters a great deal as how you build your business site so that the SERS (Search Engine Result Spiders) of Google and other top engines are easily able to locate, rank and then display it in the relevant result pages. Paying meticulous attention to the elements mentioned below is absolutely critical to improve your site’s search engine rank.

1. No-follow (nofollow) tags: While linking non-relevant niche websites, ensure you have no-follow enabled for them. It is advisable to use this tag in the links to sites you don’t trust, or you think maybe employing spamming techniques. When you are linking to your own webpages, ensure you have do-follow enabled.
2. H1 and H2/H3 tags: Making use of keyword in H1 tags helps. You can utilize H2/H3 tags for keywords. They let search engines draw more ‘value’ from your website. Having variation with the tags will be beneficial.
3. Anchor Text: It holds the key to how the on-site and off-site SEO strategies will link together. This is an HTML line of code, which helps the spiders in identifying the crux of your page. The Keywords used in your backlinks should ideally show up on the pages that you are linking to.
4. XML Site Map: If you are using WordPress, you have a lot of plugins to generate sitemap. Generally, other content management platforms will follow their own ways for adding sitemaps. Whenever you happen to update your sitemap, make it a point to ping Google, Yahoo etc.
5. Robots.txt: Ensure that your robots.txt lets search engine bots index your website. If you wish to protect certain areas of it, you may make use of ‘disallow:’ inside robots.txt for excluding those directories from ‘crawling’.
6. HTTP Compression & Design: Many sites employ content encoding by employing gzip. This particular method of compression usually tends to speed up loading. Ensure your site doesn’t have too many external HTTP calls. Less HTTP request you will make, faster your website loads and help both bots as well as readers.
7. Formats and programs: Use CSS formatting, if possible, as much as you can. Do not make use of JavaScript and images, if you can, for dropdown menus. Keep your navigation simple. If JavaScript is used, separate it with external linking.
8. Canonical Link: Ideally, you would want to control the manner in which search engines index your site content, and also the way they apply link popularity between (different) pages. The canonical tag applies the link popularity (or incoming link value) of a duplicate webpage to the one denoted as the original when it’s tagged.

Other aspects to keep in mind are as follows:

• Let all webpages include at least one link from your website. All the links should be complete.
• Ensure your code is valid, as bad code makes it difficult for engines to properly read a page in some instances. Make use of the W3C validator for checking your markup.
• Have only one unique version of homepage – 301; redirect the index/default page back to the domain.com.