On-Page, or Onsite SEO refers to the optimization process of various elements in your website. It's the process of improving the technical aspects of your web page to gain a higher positioning on SERPs (search engine result pages). Needless to say, higher rankings help your business gain visibility and incremental traffic to your site, thus impacting your sales directly.
What are the On-Page Optimization Elements?
Onsite optimization is a crucial aspect of SEO; you have to ensure an SEO-friendly website in order rank your site on Google's first results page. If you're wondering what these on-page elements are, read on below:
Content
Search engines always prefer a website with unique and high-quality content over a website with low-quality content. Google prefers high-quality, original, useful and relevant content over low-quality content that's stuffed with keywords. Thus, producing engaging copies that satisfies your reader's search intent is the first on-page aspect you should focus on.
Meta Title
Meta titles are a crucial on-page SEO factor. They appear on search results pages. Include your most important keywords in your meta titles. A meta title can be up to 70 characters long (including spaces), but it's advisable that you limit it to 60 characters.
Meta Description
Meta descriptions are short descriptions that detail what a specific web page is about. It also appears on SERP and informs the user and search engine about the contents of the page. A meta description can be up to 160 characters long and should ideally feature your focus keywords.
Header Tags
Header tags bifurcate your content into meaningful sub-topics and categories. These header tags are denoted by H1, H2, H3, and so on, with H1 and H2 being the most priority headers for SEO-friendly content.
Image Optimization
Image optimization includes making visuals friendly with search engines by improving them so that they don't affect your page load speed. You should also define alt tags for the images in your site so that Google can rank them against the relevant keyword.
URL Structure
All pages in your site should have SEO-friendly URLs. SEO-friendly URL includes your page's primary keywords and doesn't include any numeric or special characters.
Page Load Speed
Page load speed has a great influence on user experience, which in turn affects your search engine rankings. An average user will spend about 3-5 seconds on your web page; if your page takes longer than this to load, chances are that you'll end up losing a site visitor. Google PageSpeed Insights will reveal the load speed of your site's pages.
Canonical Tags
Use canonical tags for any web page with duplicate content that you don't want to be ranked on SERP.
Structured Data
Google uses a website's structured data to feature as snippets in SERPs. Thus, you should structure your data in a way that's conducive to be featured as snippets.
Robots and XML Sitemaps
The two play a significant role in crawling and indexing a website, even though they appear complex. Search engine bots use XML sitemaps to identify the pages of your site that need to be indexed, while robots.txt files specify the pages that search engine spiders should not crawl.
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