If you’ve read anything about SEO you’re probably aware of the huge ranges of factors that go into it. Many people jump right into SEO by reaching out to other sites and looking to build links and working on external signals. While link building is undeniably important, it shouldn’t be the first step for any SEO campaign. Many overlook the importance of getting their on-page SEO right, which can give you a big boost for relatively little work. Today we’ll look at what on-page SEO is, how to improve it, and why it matters to you and your business.
What Is On-Page SEO?
Simply put, on-page SEO is all of the ranking factors that sit directly on your site. This includes the content itself, but also things like meta tags and image content. Every piece you put onto your website has a play in it’s on-page SEO. It’s pretty simple to understand, but in practice can be a lot of work to get right.
Why Is On-Page SEO Important?
There are two main reasons why a focus on On-page SEO is important. For one, it influences your overall rankings in search engines. Poor on-page SEO can handicap your efforts to rank, and prevent you from moving up in search results. It also helps search engine crawlers determine the context of your page, which can help it rank for appropriate keywords with the proper search intent.
It’s also important as it helps your users navigate and understand your site. Many of the best practices for on-page SEO are directly visible to your visitors. Things like your title and meta description for instance are some of the first things your visitors will see and are keys in actually getting people to click thru to your site. Poor on-page SEO often translates to a poor user experience.
How Do I Improve My On-Page SEO?
The first step is to determine which parts of your pages are lacking. There are tools that can do this for you like SEM Rush’s On-page SEO checker or plugins like Yoast that integrate with WordPress. Tools like these can quickly give you feedback on what types of issues your page might have and how to correct them.
With that in mind, here’s a couple of common issues to keep in mind when writing your content.
Title Tag
Your title tag is important both for the search engines as well as potential visitors. It’s one of the first things that people will see, so it’s important that it both catches their attention as well as accurately describes your page.
While the days of stuffing title tags is long gone, it’s still important to make sure it accurately reflects the content of your page and shows searchers what your page is all about.
Meta Description
Also shown in the search results, your meta description should be a description of what your page is while also tempting users to click on it. Without specifying it, Google will simply take content from your page to generate it which may not always be what you want.
While Google has said it doesn’t directly impact your rankings, it does potentially have an effect on other factors which may. Things like click through rates (CTR) can be improved with proper meta descriptions, and this has been shown to be something that Google does care about.
Proper Headers
Headers are what help organize your page and are important again for both visitors and search engines. While not as impactful as they used to be, it’s still an important piece that gives search engines more context about your page.
A page without headers can be hard to navigate and makes it more difficult to figure out which information the page has. This is negative for your readers, but also for the search engine as they won’t easily be able to figure out what your page is about and what it should rank for. Headers are a great way to loudly yell “This is what my page is about!”
Part of using headers is understanding the hierarchy of headers such as being conservative with H1 tag usage. Your headers should help create a logical flow through the page and create logical sections for both your visitors and the search engine crawlers.
Image Optimization
Another often overlooked part of SEO is image optimization. This is important as search engine crawlers can’t actually see images so they rely on the text descriptions attached to them. This is primarily done through title and alt attributes on the image.
Images also play a crucial role in your site speed as they are often some of the largest elements a page needs to load. Site speed is becoming a much more important factor in ranking, especially for mobile devices that typically have a slower connection. Reducing the size of your images is usually the first step, but other options like lazy loading exist to further reduce load times.
Internal Linking
Having good internal linking (links on your site to another page on your site) is also important. Having a good internal linking structure helps search engine crawlers quickly go through your site. It also helps them figure out what types of content is related which can inform their ranking decisions.
It's also important for helping real visitors find related content that they might be interested in. This is an important lesson, in many cases working on your on-page SEO ranking factors also provides value to your visitors. Situations like this are great as they can improve multiple areas of your site at once.
Core Web Vitals
A newer factor, but one that is growing in importance is Google's core web vitals. These are a series of web metrics that include how fast the page loads and how much the page moves after rendering. Google has begun to place higher weights on these metrics, and having a site that fails them is bad news.
If you're interested, you can check how your site performs using Google's pagespeed tool.
On-Page SEO
That’s just a couple of items to keep in mind, there are a number of other factors. As noted above, the best way to find issues is to run your site and its page through an SEO checker. This will end up being much faster than going through by hand and trying to figure out issues. You should also look to keep these above items in mind when initially creating your content. The more thorough you can be to begin with the less work you’ll have to do later.
On-page SEO is important, but it’s not the end all for search engine rankings. If you find yourself falling behind, make a plan on how to correct it and work towards it. In the long term it will benefit not only your rankings, but also the experience you provide to your visitors.