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On-page SEO (also known as on-site SEO) refers to the practice of optimizing webpages to improve a website's search engine rankings and earn organic traffic.
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Search Engine Optimization is a general term that includes everything you need to do to improve your website‟s ranking positions in the top search engines.
On-Page SEO and SEO
This includes optimizing your website for the crawling and indexing phase (that‟s technical SEO ). Optimization settings you can apply to your pages and content (that‟s on-page SEO) and techniques you can use outside the boundaries of the website (that‟s off-page SEO).
On-page SEO (sometimes referred to as on-site SEO), is the process of optimizing the structure and content of a webpage. The ultimate goal of on-page SEO is to speak the „search engines‟ language‟ and help search engine crawlers understand the meaning and context of your pages.
Why is on-page SEO important?
On-page SEO is important because it provides search engines with a number of signals to help them understand what your content is about.
During the indexing and ranking processes, search engines try to associate webpages with keywords and search terms users type in the search box.
It‟s through on-page SEO elements that you can guide them as to which keywords you want your pages to rank.
Now that the theory about SEO and the importance of on-page SEO is justified, let‟s move on to the practical part.
Some people can argue that there are more on-page SEO techniques and not only 11, but these are the most important you can apply to your website today and quickly boost your SEO.
When dealing with SEO, you always need to have in mind the following:
A website with brilliant content can do great with or without SEO. A website with bad content will not survive with or without SEO. A website with good content can become even better with SEO!
So, what is considered good content?
Original content (articles, text, images, videos, presentations, info-graphics, comments, etc.) – No copies or rewrites of existing articles.
Content exclusive for your website – Even if it‟s your own content, if you have already published it on another website then it‟s not good for your site (unless you specify the canonical tag correctly).
Content that includes text elements – Write text to accompany your non-text content. For example, if you post videos on your website try to add a text description as well. If you add images try to describe in words what the image is all about.
Content that is useful – Don‟t publish content for the sake of publishing. Before hitting the publish button make sure that what goes live adds value to your website and readers.
Content that is well researched – Users don‟t want to read quickly prepared posts and neither do search engines.
Long articles are proven to rank better than short articles.
Unbiased content – If you are writing about a certain topic or answering a question make sure that what you write is justified and covers both sites of a story.
This is SEO 101 but very important for on-page SEO. When search engines „read‟ your pages, among other things, they check the page title and the description of a page.
They do so because they need to understand what the page is all about and then based on other factors (off-page SEO, domain authority , competition, etc.), they will rank your page (for various keywords) in a position in their index.
Hint: If you are not familiar with this process, spend a few minutes and learn how search engines work.
Page titles
Page Title Shown in the Browser Tab Window
Each page must have a unique title that will help both search engines and users understand what the page is about.
A page with the title “ SEO Tips for Beginners ” is better than a page with the title “index.html”.
The page title was and still is one of the most important on-page SEO factors.
Page title optimization Tips
The page description is what the searcher will see in the search engine results page (SERPS). It has to be descriptive, up to 200 characters and unique for each page.
It‟s your opportunity to advertise your page and convince users to click your link and visit your website rather than selecting one of the other links.
It should be noted that Google does not always show the meta description provided, but many times they use an automated description if they believe is more useful for the searcher.
Meta description Optimization Tips
Avoid auto-generated descriptions – Even though Google may not use your description, it‟s always a best practice to avoid using auto-generated descriptions that sometimes don‟t make sense.
Add your target keyword(s) in the description – Google still highlights the search terms both in the title and description so adding your target keywords, makes descriptions more relevant and appealing to the searcher.
To learn more about how to optimize your meta descriptions for SEO, read our study on the meta description length.
Content SEO is part of on-page SEO and has to do with optimizing the actual content for your target keywords.
Before publishing a piece of content (whether this is text, images, audio or video), the first step is to do your keyword research.
This is necessary to find out what search terms users are typing in the search box and create content that can satisfy their intent.
Once you decide on your target keywords, you should create a list of related keywords (also called LSI keywords ), longtail keywords and use them in your titles, descriptions, headings and page content.
Why? Because with the introduction of Rank Brain , Google search algorithms have become more intelligent and besides keyword relevancy in content, they are also looking for topic relevancy.
This means that in order to make your content more relevant to broad topics, you need to enrich your content with LSI keywords.
There are various ways to find out which keywords are considered by Google to be relevant to your target keywords.
The easiest and fastest way is to take advantage of three features provided by Google: Google suggest, People also ask for and Related Searches.
Google suggest
When you start typing a query in Google search, you are presented with a list of possible phrases to use in your search. These are great keyword candidates to mention in your content.
Google keywords suggest tool
4. Headings and Content Formatting
A page needs to be properly formatted. Think of it as a report which needs to have a heading (h1) and subheadings (h2, h3).
The H1 Tag
Each page needs to have only one H1 tag. If you are using WordPress then by default the title of a page is wrapped into H1 tags.
You can either choose to have the same
Remember that search engines display in the results what they find in the title tag and not the h1 tag. There are cases where you want to differentiate the two, like the example below:
Example of a Page having different page title and heading
As far as the other headings are concerned (h2, h3), the things you need to have in mind are the following:
Avoid using a single word for a heading but make your headings interesting and useful for users that like to skim read an article. Use headings hierarchically i.e. the first heading tag is the
Further Reading: What is the H1 Tag
Content Formatting
Do not just throw text on a page but make sure that it is readable.
Use bold, underline or italics to highlight the important parts of a page. Use a good size font (at least 14px). Split the text into small paragraphs (max 3-4 lines). Use enough spacing between the paragraphs to make the text easier to read. Make use of CSS to create sections that stand out and break the text into smaller more manageable parts.
Images are important for presentation purposes. They make a page more interesting and easier to understand.
The biggest problems with images are that search engines don‟t understand them and that they add to the loading speed of a page.
Best practices for SEO optimizing images
Use original images. If you need to use an existing image from the web you need to reference the source.
A permanent link (also known as a slug ) is the unique URL of each page.
Good URLs should be less than 255 characters and use hyphens to „-„ separate the different parts.
Just like the page title, an SEO friendly URL is short, descriptive and includes your target keyword.
These are some examples of good URLs:
https://www.reliablesoft.net/diy-seo-tutorial-for-beginners/ https://www.reliablesoft.net/seo-tools https://www.reliablesoft.net/search-engine-marketing/
These are examples of bad URLs:
https://www.reliablesoft.net/p?165 or https://www.reliablesoft.net/seotipsforbeginners/ or https://www.reliablesoft.net/123131/publish/data2/seo_Tips.html
Further Reading: How to create SEO Friendly URLs
URL Structure
The URL structure should mimic the actual structure of a website.
Best practices for optimizing your URL structure
Make use of categories – Group your pages into categories to help users and search engines find what they want faster.
It‟s like having a warehouse with lots of uncategorized items versus a warehouse with all the items assigned to a dedicated category.
You can have sub-categories as well but my advice is not to go over two levels. For example, a good category structure is:
Homepage > Social Media > Facebook > Article
and not like
Homepage > Social Media > Facebook > How To > Article
Add a Breadcrumb menu – A breadcrumb is helpful because it allows users to navigate your website in a structured way since they always know where they are and how far from the home page.
Further Reading: How to optimize your site structure
Linking to pages within your website is very important for SEO because:
It’s like building your own web
The first step a search engine spider will do once they discover a page, is to follow the links they find on that page (both internal and external links).
So, when they arrive at your page, if you don‟t have any other links within the text they will read your page and go.
If you have links pointing to other pages within your website they will take those into account as well.
It’s a way to let search engines know about your other pages
As explained above when search engines find a page with links, they will go and read those pages too, so you can use this technique to tell search engines about pages of your website they have not yet discovered.
Last but not least, 2 SEO techniques that are becoming more and more important are: speed and mobile-friendliness.
Page Loading Speed
Google is investing a huge amount of money to make the web faster. In every Google, I/O someone will talk about the importance of speed and their desire to include the fastest websites in their index.
In order to „force‟ web site owners to take speed into account, they have officially added speed as one of the known ranking factors.
So, we know for sure that website speed does matter when it comes to SEO and ranking.
As a webmaster, your job is to make sure that your website loads as fast as possible by taking into account Google’s recommendations. Having fast-loading websites is not only good for SEO but for customer retention and conversions.
Bounce Rate and Page Speed
Almost 60% of the searches in Google are now coming from mobile devices. This means that if your website is not mobile-friendly, you are already losing half of the potential traffic.
What should you do?
As a first step, make sure that your website is mobile-friendly. Check your website with the Google mobile friendly tool and fix any potential problems.
Then go one step further and test your website on mobile, like a real user would do, and make sure that everything is displayed correctly including your CTA buttons.
In general websites with a responsive design, have nothing to worry about mobile- friendliness.
If you have read the article up to this point, the main tips are summarized in the checklist below.
Make sure that you understand the difference between on-page SEO and off- page SEO. Make sure that your content is original, useful and well researched. Review and optimize your page titles by adding keywords, power words and numbers. Provide for a unique meta description for all your pages (include your target keywords). Perform keyword research and make sure that your target keywords are part of the title and content. Find LSI and related keywords and use them in your headings and content. Make sure that your page has only one H1 tag. Use headings hierarchically on the page (H1 -> H2 -> H3). Beautify your content (use bold, italics and CSS). Optimize your images and other multimedia elements (ALT Text is the most important factor for images). Make sure your URLs are SEO Friendly and that your URL Structure mimics your site structure. Add internal links to your content. Add outbound links to your content (link out to high-quality related websites). Make sure that your website loads in less than 3 seconds (both desktop and mobile). Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly. Encourage comments but only publish comments that make sense.
To achieve maximum exposure in the search engines and keep your users happy you need both off-page SEO and on-page SEO.
On-page SEO is more important (at least for new websites), and I will explain below why.
‘Speak’ the search engines language
It makes more sense to start with on-page SEO and get it right rather than trying to convince search engines to give you better rankings with off-page SEO.
Search engines are computer programs (software) and they don‟t „see‟ a website like a normal user, but they can only understand code and in particular the HTML language.
With SEO and especially on-page SEO, you „speak‟ their language. Your goal is to help them understand, by giving them various signals through the structure of a page and content optimization, what a page is all about.
The more signals you can give them, the greater are your chances of achieving better rankings.
On-Page SEO is about the user as well
Never forget that your primary goal is to keep your users happy.
Off-Page SEO may bring traffic to the website but if it is not set up correctly or if it is not user-friendly, the results will be disappointing.