Optimising your business website is important if you want to be seen online by your audience. It is likely you’ve heard On-page SEO going around, and it is the practice of optimising each webpage individually to be able to rank higher in the relevant search engine results.
Ranking higher leads to better traffic from those search engine results and this is going to help you to increase your conversion rate overall.
On-page SEO doesn’t just refer to the content, but the HTML source code of a page that is able to be optimised. This is a completely different thing to off-page SEO, which talks about links and other external signals.
On-page SEO also involves fixing all issues and improving the elements of your website to make the entire thing as search-friendly as possible. When you perform those fixes on keywords, URLs, content and site design, it all helps you to improve your website and makes you stand out in the marketplace. It’s a noisy place to be, online, so you must do everything that you can to optimise your online presence to make your voice heard as much as possible. It all starts with making sure that you know the basics so that you can get it right.
Reading your page content like search engine bots do.
Before we dive into the important components of On-Page SEO, we first need to understand search engines and humans view webpages differently.
Search engines bots read your webpages very differently to you and I. Since a young age, we have been trained to use the visual clues in the formatting and the accommodating material to understand the story or topic of the article.
As an example articles headings and titles, usually appear bigger, bolder and have clear space above and below them to highlight their importance, and make them easy to read. Likewise, images or graphical elements are often used to help tell the story within the article.
From our children’s picture storybooks to business reports and webpages, there is a general set of unwritten rules for text and page layout, that allows us to read text quicker and more efficiently.
Search engines bots can’t read the text and images like we do, simply because they do not have eyes as we do. In fact, they don’t’ really see at all, rather they read. They read through the code of webpages to determine what the page and article are about.
( This is a bit of lie, Google has developed image reading software, but it just completes the subject, so it is best to leave this out at the moment.)
So how to search engine bots work out what is heading text, normal text or an image? Over the 40+ history of world wide web, certain code standards have been placed in the HTML code to help give context to the different elements within the page. These are called HTML tags or tags for short. They are simple markups that surround the element and give it relevance within the article. In a very simplistic version, HTML tags look this :
<title> This is the page title tag </title>
This above tag denotes the page title, the tag for a paragraph of text is :
<p> this is a paragraph of text <p>
or the tag for an image is:
<image> html image code within these tags </image>
and heading tags are:
<h1> </h1>, <h2> </h2>, <h3> </h3>, <h4> </h4>, <h5> </h5>
Heading tags are different to most tags as there are several of them, with a number within the tag denoting the heading’s importance, <h1> being the most important to <h6> being the least important.
Now we are really lucky we don’t have to write these tags into our articles ourselves. ( In the old days, this was done). Most of these tags are added by the CMS software we are using and the page WYSIWYG or Gutenberg editor if you are using WordPress like this website.
By styling our articles with the appropriate style and formatting, the HTML tags are automatically added to the article.
The Important Components Of On-Page SEO
There are many important components of on-page SEO, and understanding them is vital for SEO success. Let’s take a look:
Meta Tags
The implementation of tags are the most important aspect of your on-page SEO and when they are written well, they will improve your traffic. These will provide all search engines with the right information about your page.
Title Tags
There are a lot of tags on your page, and the most important of all of these is your title tag. It’s the one phrase your audience will search for in search engine results, and both paid ads and natural search will show this title to your audience – it shows what the page is about. You should keep the title tags short and as descriptive as possible, with up to 70 characters.
Meta Description
This tells your users what they will find when they reach your page. Search engines read these to understand the topic of the page and a well-written meta description will give you an advantage over your competition. Make it clear what users will find!
Meta Tags Tip
The meta tags do not appear in the content section of a webpage along with the main article content, they appear in the header section of the webpage, and it is hidden from view, and it only really contains information that the search engine bots will read.
To edit the Meta tags, particularly the Meta Title and Meta Description, there is usually a text box for each of these items within the page editing screen.
It’s good to know that it is the meta description that appears in the search engine results. So it needs to be enticing and relevant for the user to click on it.
Heading Tags
Landing pages and blogs should always include heading tags: H1, H2, H3 and P tags are essential. There should only ever be one H1 tag on any web page, and your heading will represent all sections of the page.
Content Tag Tips
Your main keyword should be included in all of the H1, H2, H3 tags, and 2-3 times in your P tags.
Images
Pictures speak more than text does most of the time, and if you want to grab the attention of your audience, you need to consider using image tags, image title and even an alt text to describe audio to users who are struggling with what’s going on on the page.
Image SEO tips
Your primary keyword should be in the image file name, image title and the alt text as these are the primary sources of information for search engines to work out what is the context of the image.
Mobile Responsivity
While you are ensuring that you have all of the components on your on-page SEO, you still need to ensure that your page has to be relevant. Your on-page SEO can improve with an entirely user-friendly website. This includes ensuring that the website is mobile-friendly and responsive to the user, providing the same experience on a mobile as the website would on a computer. Your website will have a more significant impact on the audience if they can actually use it, and your on-page SEO is vital here.
Perfect Optimisation
Your website should be smooth to use from the top to the bottom and everything in between. The appearance of the page and the technical side of things – to the optimized meta tags and descriptions. All of these things will help you to better communicate with your audience, enabling you to educate yourself on the best possible search presence that you can offer. By providing search engines with the right signals, your content has to be of high quality, and this will help you to interact better with your audience.
The whole point of on-page SEO is to engage with your audience while providing search engines with the best possible information. The page that is optimised with on-page SEO is one that will create a user experience to remember.
If you have any questions please fill free to pop them in the comments below.
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