Anybody who wants their content to be visible in search engines understands just how crucial the concept of SEO can be for success. Between juggling the seemingly hundreds of tiny technical considerations that search engine algorithms purportedly seek and creating the highest level quality of content, it can make you want to pull your hair out at times.

SEO is a very broad series of factors that involve both on-page and ranking factors. All too often, people focus on the latter set of considerations and ignore entirely the on-page elements. This can lead to lopsided – and often inferior – results in due time. Nobody wants to put tons of effort into an SEO strategy only for it to fall flat on its face!

As such, let’s dive into some of the most crucial on-page SEO elements you may currently be neglecting. Addressing these elements is a pivotal part of achieving the best very results, so let’s begin.

Interactions and Engagements

How extensively is your target audience engaging with your pages? The answer may determine how well you rank in search results. Ultimately, search engines look for various signals and indicators that the pages being shown to audiences are in fact relevant and interesting to them. As such, they don’t want to be pinging URLs to pages that are either irrelevant or off-putting to their users.

Factors such as your bounce rate, clickthrough rates and pages per session all may affect your long-term SEO viability. If people are quickly leaving your website, not browsing multiple pages or failing to even click on your pages in the search engine results pages, then this can tell search engines your content is not worth its current position in search. As such, be sure to optimize your pages to encourage visitors to keep reading, clicking and engaging.

Proper Linking Structure

Each page by itself is isolated, undiscovered and useless. Only with a network of connected pages via links can your SEO efforts be realized. It is for this reason that many SEO efforts fail: they lack a sufficient number of links among each other and with the outside world to be indexed and crawled properly.

While having an organized link structure that follows from primary pages to secondary and tertiary pages is essential, so is cultivating relevant opportunities to network between two or more similar pages on your site. Every link built is another opportunity to guarantee that page is discovered and indexed, and it can also potentially help boost visibility of weaker pages when associated with better-performing ones.

Links pointing to other websites – and even more importantly, links from other websites pointing toward yours – further ensure each page’s potential is realized.

Mobile Compatibility

Last but not least, remember that most visitors are coming to your pages via mobile devices. Optimizing SEO on-page cannot neglect this cold, hard reality. Responsive web design is the most important aspect of this process, ensuring your pages and content render in a mobile-friendly way.

Other crucial reforms include maximizing page speed to please both search engines and mobile users alike, pinging URLs and links in easy-to-read formats and even using variations of keywords and phrases that are more likely to be used by mobile audiences (with mobile, shorter searches tend to be more common).

Before you spend any more time trying to optimize SEO outcomes, make sure you are focusing on on-page elements. These critical examples can dramatically affect the long-term progress of your broader SEO efforts, so be sure to devote enough time to ensuring each and every one of your pages is optimized thoroughly.