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Our search engine optimization strategy can be divided into two different categories: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Both are crucial to the success of an SEO campaign, but they’re on completely different sides of the fence when it comes to improving your search engine rankings. To understand the difference between the two, you have to understand, at a basic level, how search engine algorithms work.
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What is On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO (also known as “on-site” SEO) is the act of optimizing different parts of your website that affect your search engine rankings. It’s stuff that you have control over and can change on your own website. Here are the biggest factors included.
Title Tags
Put your targeted keywords in the title tag of each page on your site. There are many best practices that go into writing an effective title tag.
Headings (H1)
Headings are usually the largest words on the page, and for that reason, search engines give them a little more weight than your other page copy. It is a good idea to work your target keywords into the headings of each web page but make sure you accurately reflect your page content.
URL structure
Put keywords into your URLs if possible. However, do not go changing all of your current URLs just so they have keywords in them. You shouldn’t change old URLs unless you plan on redirecting your old ones to your new ones. Consult a professional before doing this.
Alt text for images
Any content management system should allow you to add something called “alt text” to all images on your website. This text isn’t visible to the average visitor – alt text is in fact used by screen reader software to help blind internet users understand the content of your images. Search engines crawl images in a similar way, so inserting some relevant keywords while accurately describing the image will help search engines understand your page’s content.
Fast-loading pages, or page load speed
Google wants to help its users find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible to provide the best user experience. Therefore, optimizing your pages to load faster helps your site rank higher in the search results.
Page content
The content on your pages needs to be useful to people. If they search for something too specific to find your page, they need to be able to find what they’re looking for. It needs to be easy to read and provide value to the end user. Google has various ways to measure if your content is useful.
Internal Linking
Linking internally to other pages on your website is useful to visitors and it is also useful to search engines. Here’s an internal link to another blog post on our site that talks more about internal linking. Very meta.
On-page SEO ensures that your site can be read by both potential customers and search engine robots. With good on-page SEO, search engines can easily index your web pages, understand what your site is about, and easily navigate the structure and content of your website, thus ranking your site accordingly.
Importance of on-page SEO
On-page SEO consists of all the elements of SEO you can control best. If you own a website, you can control the technical issues and the quality of your content. We believe on-page issues should all be tackled as they’re in your own hands. If you create an awesome website, it will definitely start ranking. Focusing on on-page SEO will also increase the probability that your off-page SEO strategy will be successful. Link building with a crappy site is a very tough job. Nobody wants to link to articles that are badly written or boring.
