What is On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO (also known as on-site SEO) is the focus of optimizing the elements on a website as opposed to off-site SEO which usually refers to link building and other factors helping boost signals to your website. It’s not just about the content of the website but also optimizing the code of the website.

It has become more and more about user experience (UX) in recent years with Google updates. Basically, good on-page SEO delivers to the user in a very easy and user friendly way if the page answers the questions they just searched.

Content and Keywords

Gone are the days of optimizing websites just for computers which is never what on-page SEO should have been about and is why you see sites that deliver useful and helpful information to users in the most user friendly way have continued to stay at the top of search engine rankings regardless of the updates that have rolled out.

Proper setup of a page with URL slug, title tag, headers and relevant content play a vital role still but the use of the keywords and the setup should look and feel organic. Remember, you’re ultimately creating content for a user to digest and answer some sort of question they asked to get there.

If you keep these key things in mind when writing content for your site, your bound to find success:

• Depth of Topic – Google Panda went after “thin” content that didn’t provide thorough information about what the page was optimized for. Making sure you go into detail about a content topic is a great way to set yourself up for long term success.
• User Experience – make sure you’re actually trying to answer the question the user searched and your site is setup in a way that provides answers to the user in an easy way that gives them the best user experience possible.
• Unique Content – duplicating content from your site or somewhere else can potentially harm your rankings so it’s important to be unique in the information you’re providing to users.

Technical On-page SEO

This is probably one of the most overlooked aspects of optimizing your website. A lot of people tend to focus on content because it’s easier and while that’s true, it’s also important to make sure you’re satisfying some technical things or it won’t really matter if you have the most amazing content in the world on your site.

• Links – How many are there? Internal or external? Are they to useful information?
• Page Load Speed – how fast a site loads is very important because remember, we’re solving a users problem by answering a question. If it takes forever to load that’s not a good indicator of useful content to Google for a user.
• Structured Data – using proper Schema.org mark up in your content goes a long way into helping boost your optimizations you’re doing on your site.
• Mobile Friendly – with more and more folks doing searches from their phone, Google has prioritized sites that are mobile friendly. The good news is you can easily check to see if your site is mobile friendly. The bad news is that if it’s not, it could require a decent amount of development work to make it friendly.

Are you seeing the trend yet? All these things lead to delivering a good user experience to the person visiting your website. If you focus on user experience from both content and technical aspect, you’re destined for success with your on-page SEO efforts, it’s really that simple.

On-page optimization is one of our core SEO services we offer. In our free consultations, it’s one of the biggest discussion topics we go over!