On-site SEO helps your website pages rank better with search engines. This is done by optimizing. The digital marketing world calls this search engine optimization (SEO). There are 12 types of SEO. You can learn more about these by visiting What are the different types of SEO?
On-site SEO
To begin, on-site SEO and on-page SEO are used interchangeably. The same goes for off-site SEO and off-page SEO. I prefer to call it on-site since we are planning to optimize each page on the entire website. But, either term is acceptable and understood to do the same things.
I’ve put together a basic checklist of 10 items that you will need to optimize for your on-site SEO. They are as follows:
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Title tag
Title tags give an accurate description of your content and are designed as the first thing a search engine result page (SERP) will display after a search query. You want your keyword or phrase to appear in the title tag. Your content management system (CMS), such as WordPress or Wix, will label these as Add Title tags. In hypertext markup language (html) they are the same size as H1 heading tags.
Heading tag(s)
Heading tags have a hierarchical structure (e.g. H1-H6). The H stands for “higher” thus an H1 has a higher ranking than an H6. After your initial title tag, you would typically only use subheading tags ranging from H2-H6. Most generally H2-H3, or even H4. You could opt to use another H1 but chances are good that this will disrupt the hierarchy of your context layout. One example where you could do this would be to have a title tag named Home and a second H1 heading with the title of our business.
Descriptive URLs
URLs or (uniform resource locator) links are similar to a house number on your street. You want to know exactly where you’ll end up if you click on that URL or link. You can create a URL anywhere within your body copy content. Simply select or highlight the text that you want to link within your CMS and then look for the icon within your menu that looks like a chain link. Select it and you will be given the option to paste and submit the url to the page that you want to link. Make your URL text sound natural within your content.
Meta description
A meta description or <metadata> describes data to an (html) document. Megadata is data, or information, about data. It describes to the user what the page is about (a summary). Most CMS have a 155 character limit when describing this data. Again, it’s good to include keyword(s) within your meta description.
Keywords
Keyword placement involves strategically placing them throughout the context of your website pages. You want the tone of your words to sound as natural and fluid as possible without “keyword stuffing”. Search Engines will look to the relevancy of your keywords and use this information to index your content. And by doing so strategically, it should keep people interested in continuing to read your topic. Here’s a supporting article from John Mueller on keyword placement on a page.
Linking structure
There are three types of links (e.g. internal links, external links, and backlinks). Internal links, or hyperlinks, connect your content within your own website. They also provide an understanding to Google about the structure of your site. Sitemaps are often created to stay organized, and track your links. They’re a hierarchy of your pages and posts, which when optimized, allow you to provide relevant content to the right person at the right time. Learn more about What is a sitemap.
External links are hyperlinks that take you to a resource on another website. These are also known as Anchor text. And backlinks are when another website hyperlinks back to your website. You want backlinks that have a high authority rating.
Optimize for video and images
Optimizing for the web involves creating and uploading content that is of visual quality, correct & ideal format (file type), good resolution, reduced “enough” in size that will entice user engagement. Use simple, plain language to describe your alt-text labels and add meta descriptions <metadata> which will aid search engine crawlers in understanding your pages context. Optimize your thumbnails and use image XML sitemaps. To learn more, see What is an image sitemap?
WordPress prefers video formats that are set to MP4 and Web Optimized. With resolutions that are greater than 1080p, adjust the “Resolution Limits” in the Dimensions section of the video menu, which will preserve the original resolution.
Strong call to action (CTA)
Use an active, rather than passive, voice when creating a CTA (e.g. Buy Now, Sign-up Today, etc.). Best Practice dictates to display the CTA within the first visual view of your context. This is referred to as being located “above” the fold line. Or, the upper half of the page. You want to let the user know right away that you have something to offer them. A solution to their “pain” problem. If you don’t let them know that you have something to offer right away, they may not continue reading. Thus, they would miss your CTA if it were located lower down on the page.
Structured data and schema markup
Schema is a language used to represent data, yet the actual data is called structured data. Schema markup (schema.org) is code used to describe elements that search engines recognize and understand. There are 32 different types of schema that Google recognizes. By communicating this, search engines can then deliver rich, or rich snippet results and display this information for your search engine result pages (SERPs).
These are additional caveats beyond the typical title and meta description (SERP). Note that using structured data does not guarantee that Google will select to improve your rankings, but at least you have the opportunity to be selected. This is all about communicating with the search engines. To learn more about the different types of schema, see a SEMrush blog called What Is Schema?
Crawlability and indexability
If Google has trouble crawling or indexing your site, your information will never make it into the search engine. Google’s web crawler is named Googlebot. It has the enormously large task of crawling every single internet page in the world. And that is why as an SEO professional, you need to understand how to communicate with a crawler. Your job is to audit and analyze your website data (pages) and correct any errors that your SEO software, such as SEMrush, etc. tells you that the crawlers are having trouble understanding.
Think of Google as an enormous library whose job it is to categorize everything it encounters (e.g. content, links, and metadata). If it doesn’t understand your content, it has to move on. Crawling is discovering pages and links that find more pages and links, add infinitum. Indexing on the other hand is storing, categorizing, and analyzing content and the connections between pages. It analyzes every single word and every single phrase, then indexes it. To learn more, see What Is Crawling and Indexing?
Consistency
As you can see, on-site SEO can have an enourmous impact on your pages ranking. Yet by following Best Practice technic’s using your SEO software, you also can have an enourmous impact on your pages ranking. When I think about all the work that Googlebot is doing on a daily basis, I’m actually thankful that I can simply sit at my desk, login to some analytics software, click a few buttons, and it pretty much tells me what I need to do for next-steps. As mentioned, this blog is intended to point you in a direction to help to begin improving your rankings. And hopefully the Google god’s will shine favorably upon you the next time that Googlebot comes around to take a look at what you’ve got for ’em. 🙂