What Is On Page SEO?

What Is SEO?

SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimisation, refers to improving online content so that search engines (primarily Google) can easily find, index, and use it to display for relevant searches. The more relevant your website is to the searches, the higher your result will appear on the search page. Likewise, the closer your result appears to number one, the more website visitors you will get for that particular search.

In this blog post, we will look at on-page SEO, which deals with what businesses themselves can do on their website to improve their position in search engines.

The most important parts of on-page SEO are:

• Page Title
• Heading tags
• Content

Page Titles

A page title is the heading you can see on Google for each search result. It is the first place search engines will look to understand the content of a web page. If you use WordPress, this will be the name you have given the page. Often this is “Home” or “About”. However, if you think about these words, they will usually mean nothing in the context of your business.

Heading Tags

Heading tags are hierarchical and start with h1, moving to h2, h3 etc. So, for example, each page on a website should have one and only one h1 tag.

Using this page as an example, the one h1 tag is “what is on-page SEO?”. There are then two h2 tags – “what is SEO” and “Why is SEO important?”, Following this, there are multiple h3 tags. It may make more sense if you think of it as writing a Word document.

Google reads the headers as context providers for the page and helps to understand the page better. The better a search engine can understand the page, the more likely it is to improve its position in the rankings when a relevant search is performed.

Content

On-page content is vital! Most of a page’s content will be paragraph text and images.

Spelling and Grammar are vitally important to quality content. The content you create on your website needs to be unique, well written and cover everything involved in the subject. There is often talk about how long a content piece should be. The answer to this is as long as it takes!

If you can cover everything in 200 words, that is how long it needs to be. If it takes 4000 words to cover everything, that is fine.

Images should be optimised before uploading to your website. There are free image optimisers online that you can use to drastically reduce the file size of the image before uploading. This will not affect the quality of the image displayed on the website. It would make the image look grainy if projected onto a wall, but this level of detail is rarely required for website use.

Optimising the image size will help speed your website load time up, which is a factor in Google rankings.

Another important factor is to name your images properly. People often upload images straight from a digital camera or mobile phone, meaning an image will have huge file size and be named a selection of letters and numbers.

Name the image something more appropriate. For example, what is the image displaying? What service is it representing? Try to get a keyword into the name of the image. You can also add ‘alt text’, which is a paragraph of text explaining the image.

If you use a CMS such as WordPress, you can add this for each image. Then, click on the image on the page or through the media library and fill in the Title and Alt Tag areas with keyword-rich, appropriate text.

If you have an HTML site, you need to add alt=”your alt text” inside your img tag.

Here are three tips to help with optimising your on-page SEO:

1. Keyword Research and Analysis – Use tools such as Google Search Console to identify what keywords and phrases your website is being found for. Identifying how people describe and search for your services will help you learn how to structure your content and may give a helping hand when you are thinking about creating new content.
2. Write practical, worthwhile headlines, subheadings and tags- H1, H2, and H3 are HTML tags that refer to your written content’s headings. H1 is the main heading, which should include relevant, targeted words which point back to your page title. H2 is the subheading for H1, and so on.
3. Add visual content- Visual content is just as important as it can add relevant context to your online content, which is engaging and eye-catching, breaking up text-based content and providing context to the page.

Why is SEO important?

SEO is important for businesses because it ensures their online content is easily discoverable. In layman’s terms, no matter how beautiful your shop may be, the money spent on making it beautiful would be a waste if it is not accessible to your clientele. SEO, done well, means you have potentially given search engines the best content to show to your prospective clients online.

SEO is also important for the clients you are trying to appeal to. The better the user experience, the likelier Google (or other search engines) will see this and favour your efforts.

Once you have understood SEO properly, you as a business will likely better understand the online environment in which you are advertising. You are aware of what trends are relevant, especially to your client base, and you can compare your efforts with your competitors and, therefore, can easily see where you can improve as a business.

In conclusion, SEO is a holistic process. Still, the effective practice of on-page SEO is ensuring that search engines can productively use the content you have to help market your business.

Check out the ways we can optimise your SEO here.