Categories: SEO

SEO 103: What is On-Page SEO or On-Site SEO?

In short, On-Page SEO is how one optimizes one’s website to rank it higher in SERPs. Search engines need to understand your content, and if you make it easy for them to do so, you will rank higher [1-5]. How relevant your content is to a search query is but one factor that may influence the SERPs.

Some Familiar On-Page SEO Factors

For Off-Page SEO, read our Off-Page SEO article here.

1. Content and Structure

Content is king. Writing great content is part of the way to keeping the reader engaged. The content needs to be original, fresh and engaging. But the internal structure of the content is equally important. How do the pages titles, tags, URLs, header sections and html structure link with one another?

For example, on a standard recipe page, the overarching structure might be

<title>Paprika Chicken</title>
<h1>Easy Paprika Chicken</h1>
<h2>Ingredients</h2>
<h2>Directions</h2>
<h3>Nutrition Facts</h3>
<h4>Per Serving</h4>
<etc ...>

Your tags for the same page may be “Chicken”, “Paprika”, “Paprika Chicken”, etc. The category for the blog may be “recipes”.

2. Site Speed or Page Load Speed

The slower your site, the less likely people will click on your page. If you have not engaged with the potential user within 3 seconds, you are most likely to loose them. For every second that your page takes to load, the greater chance that users will abandon your page.

People will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Site Speed is one of the On-Page SEO tests. There are many tools out there that can help you test page speed. Two well-known ones are Google’s Pagespeed Insights and Gtmetrix.

3. HTML Tags & Metadata

The html <title> tag and the meta “description” tag are what appear in SERPs, along with the url of your web page. By optimizing your On-Page SEO, you can tailor make what is seen in the browser.

If one searches for “Indian Restaurants“, Google will return 10 results per page relevant to your location.

The dark grey link is the URL of the page.

The blue link is the title of the page. Google typically displays the first 50–60 characters of a title tag.

The description is the text below the blue link.

There are a number of basic Meta tags.

Meta charset – Specifies the character encoding for the HTML document.

<meta charset="UTF-8">

Meta Description Attribute – Define a description of your web page

<meta name="description" content="Place the meta description text here.">

Meta Keywords Attribute – Define keywords for search engines

<meta name="keywords" content="HTML, CSS, JavaScript">

Meta Author – Define the author of a page. Not really needed.

<meta name="author" content="John Doe Doe John">

Meta Refresh tag – Tells the web browser to redirect the user to a different URL after a set amount of time. You should not use them.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="30">

Meta Robots Attribute – You’re telling the search engines what to do with your page. The options are index/noindex and follow/nofollow.
- index: tells the bot to index the page;
- noindex: tells the bot not to index the page;
- follow: tells the bot to crawl links on the page;
- nofollow: tell the bot not to crawl links on the page.

<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
<meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow">
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">

Meta viewport – Viewport is the user’s visible area of a web page. On Mobile and Desktop the viewable area is different.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">

The <meta keywords=”…”> tag is irrelevant and can be ignored.

4. Crawlability

Search engines need to crawl your site to find keywords and the structure of your site. As part of your On-Page SEO, your site needs to be crawlable. One why to do this is via a sitemap, which should be available on the root level of your site. I.e. recipes.com/sitemap.xml.

Best practice would be to create a sitemap and submit it to Google and Bing. Block content that you do not want to be crawled through a robots.txt file. Create a SSL certificate for your site and fix all broken links.

Also try and limit your url length. Do not have long url’s. Try and limit the number of words to between 3 and 5. Use hyphens, not underscores and use lowercase letters.

5. Mobile Friendly

Is your site mobile friendly? The mobile “friendly” or “not so friendly” index will become Google’s primary ranking index. In a recent post on Techcrunch, it shows that by September 2020, mobile “friendly” will become Google’s de facto index factor.

To ensure that your site is mobile friendly, make sure that it is responsive, loads fast and that your content is optimized.

You can test your site by using Google’s mobile-friendly test tool.

Enter your URL and click “Test URL“. So easy.

If your site is successful, it will pass and say “Page is mobile friendly“.