Everything Your Business Needs To Know About On Page SEO

On Page SEO, otherwise known as technical SEO, is a very important element of successful SEO. Google looks at many factors to rank a web page such as the actual content on the page, links from other sites going to that page, and much more. Optimizing your website for SEO is one of the most important places to start when trying to improve your SEO presence. Here are the most important things you need to know about On Page SEO.

Website Architecture & URL’s

Site architecture is critical for successful on page SEO. Google indexes unique urls, therefore the structure of your urls and how they are displayed is incredibly important for the health of your SEO. You want to make sure that your site architecture contains the most important pages at the top level of the architecture and that the child pages are easily accessible with the least amount of clicks into the site.
Additionally, you want your url structures and links on the menu items to be optimized for SEO. For instance if you have a page about dogs, your menu link should be Dogs and the url should be https://yoursite.com/dogs. Child pages may follow a similar format, such as yoursite.com/dogs/golden-retreivers or they may simply just be yoursite.com/golden-retrievers. How you structure your child page’s site architecture may really depend on whether you want the parent page in the url structure or whether you want a simpler url.
Try to avoid bad urls like yoursite.com/123=?exe or something that has no semantic meaning that will be useful for SEO purposes.

Page Title Tags

The title tag is arguably the most important tag on any page. The title tag displays above the url in search results and tells the search engine what the title of your page is.

If possible, your page title should start with the most important keywords that you want to rank for, for that specific page. For instance, if you want your homepage to rank for chicken cutlets and your company name is Prized Chicken, your home page title should look something like, “Chicken Cutlets & Chicken Breasts | Prized Chicken.” Google only displays approximately 70 characters, so make sure your page title is no longer than 70 characters. You don’t have to start with your main keywords, but if you can fit the keywords into the title, you should.

Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions tell the search engines what your web page is about. The meta description does not show up on the actual web page itself. They are displayed underneath your url in the search results, which makes them very important for click-through rate and overall SEO.
Your meta description can only be about 140 characters, twice as long as the page title. You should go into more detail than the page title, but remember you can only fit so much so try and keep it brief. It is a tough skill to be as descriptive and useful about the contents of the page as possible with such a small character limit. It is important that your meta description is unique to each page, as each page should be unique in content as well. Google can penalize you for having duplicate meta descriptions.

Header tags

You should have one header 1 tag, or “<h1>”, on each page, and, if applicable, include the proper keywords in that tag relating to the page. This will almost always go towards the top of the page as the title of the page. The header 2 tags, or “<h2>”, should be the next most important header tags. However, with h2’s and the other header tags, it is ok to have multiple ones on the same page. Essentially, your h2’s should be the second most important headings, h3’s third, h4’s fourth, and so forth. The non-header 1 tags should really be there to break up content and explain a new section. Header tags don’t necessarily have to have keywords you are trying to rank for. They should really be more focused on guiding or having utility for the user.

Image Alt Tags

Search engines cannot index the pixels in an image. Therefore, they need to have some HTML text, also known as alt tags, to understand what the image is about. For instance, your image will look something like this in the code: <img src=”example.com/example.jpg” alt=”this is a description of an image”>. You need to have an alt tag in an image to describe what the image is about so the search engines can find it easily.
Additionally, the image source tells the search engines what the url of the image is and where to find it. Therefore, making sure the file of the image is a name such as /images/red-flowers.jpg vs. /images1234235kj.jpg is much easier for the search engines to understand, regarding the keywords related to the image. So, if you are uploading images to a CMS, it is best to name them something the search engines will understand and something you might want to rank for.

Keyword Density & Content

If you want to rank for a certain keyword but it only shows up once on the page you want to rank for that keyword, you may be underusing it. However, search engines also notice if you use a keyword too often. This is called keyword density. Optimal keyword density is approximately 3-5% for a given keyword in a page, and having a keyword show up more than 5% on a page of content could potentially cause harm to your rankings. Search engines may think you are trying too hard to rank for that keyword, and actually penalize you for over optimizing your content for just SEO rankings. Therefore, making sure you have used the keywords enough times, maybe 5 times, in a 250 word page will generate the best overall results.
Search engines also want to make sure that each page on your website is valuable, and not just created for SEO itself. You want to make sure your content is quality, and that each page has at least 250 words (unless it’s a gallery, portfolio, or some other page that specifically does not need text). Research has proven that longform content is actually much more valuable in which the content of a page is 2000 to 3000 keywords on a page. Simply writing the bare minimum to satisfy search engines of 250 words is not enough. That is just enough to not get penalized for creating useless, empty pages. Longform content has proven to be most successful because it is more likely to be unique and valuable content that gets more links and shares from other people.

Internal Link Optimization

Having good internal link optimization helps search engines determine which pages are connected to each other and which are most useful on your site. Additionally, search engines want your site to be user friendly. Therefore, having a good internal linking schema, should make it easier for the user to navigate through your website. Making sure your website has an intuitive menu and ability to get to other child pages is a good start, as well as adding other links to the footer that a user might not be able to easily find in the menu. It is also a good idea to have internal links on each page to other pages of your website that may be relevant. For instance, the contact page or the resources pages that may have more detailed information, or a blog post that goes into more detail about a specific topic on one of your pages.

Robots and Crawlers

The major search engines crawl your website in order to understand what it is about. The search engines look for a robots.txt file to see what pages they should crawl. Utilizing the robots.txt page to tell search engines what pages not to crawl may help your SEO if they had previously been crawling pages that should not have been crawled or may be damaging to your SEO rankings. For instance, you may not want them to crawl media urls that have individual images or files that are not meant to be website content or pages. You may also want to look at Google Web Masters to see if Google is having any difficulty crawling your website.

Canonical Links

Canonical links tell search engines which pages are actually duplicate pages or a similar page of another main page. For example, if you have a page that is the second page of products, it will have similar content. Your main products page may be something like this, yoursite.com/products and if you click page 2 it might look something like this, yoursite.com/products=2?. You can use canonical links to tell the search engines that page 2, 3, and so forth of the products for a category or search results are actually the same as the main page. Therefore, Google will put more weight on yoursite.com/products instead of seeing all those pages as duplicate pages and penalizing them for duplicate content. Canonical links can be useful for things like pagination, pages in which you are leveraging content from another website, and other duplicate or similar page content situations that could penalize your SEO rankings.

Blogging

Blogging is one of the most important elements of on page SEO for many sites because it is the easiest way to write content targeting keywords. Your services and products pages cannot be overloaded with unnecessary details or too many keywords, bogging down the user looking to get a quick understanding of your services. Blog posts can be used to go into detail on specific keywords or topics you may want to rank for without ruining your main pages. According to Hubspot, websites with blogs get 55% more traffic and 75% more leads. A blog isn’t the only way to generate more content, and things like whitepapers and ebooks can work too, but it is often one of the easiest starting points for a business to generate high quality content on a consistent basis.

Site Speed:

Site speed is a major issue effecting most websites. Optimizing your website for site speed is crucial for SEO rankings. Search engines favor sites with faster page load times. There are many things that effect a website page load time from the code itself, the server, the media and assets being loaded and much more. There are tools like GT Metrix and Google Page Speed insights that can help you find ways to improve site speed. Ultimately you may need to spend significant time with your web development team to optimize your website because it is not necessarily one or two things that will move the needle heavily but a large combination of improvements that can take a long time to complete.

Responsive Design:

Google is now penalizing non-mobile friendly websites as of April 2015. This means having a mobile optimized website is critical for SEO rankings. Responsive design is the best way to do this, and using a responsive framework like Zurb’s Foundation or Bootstrap is a great way to accomplish a responsive design. Responsive design accounts for all the screen sizes, not just certain screen sizes, therefore, it is the best way to ensure your website works well on all screen sizes.

UI & UX

The user interface and user experience of your website can actually greatly influence your SEO rankings. Google notices when a visitor goes to your website and immediately leaves back to Google. This means your site is most likely not useful or was a bad experience for that user searching that specific keyword. Having quality design can be the difference between a user utilizing your website or simply going back to Google to find something better.

Social Media Sharing

Social media sharing is critical to SEO. Search engines are looking for social sharing signals just as much as they are looking for backlinks. Having social media sharing buttons on products, certain pages, and blog posts can make your website and content much more likely to be shared. The search engines crawl the major social media sites regularly, and if they see your content consistently being shared, they know it has value, boosting your rankings.

Site Map Submission

Submitting your sitemap to Google and the other search engines is helpful for getting your site indexed. You want to make sure your website is getting indexed properly because this is how Google determines what pages can actually show up on search engines. Having a proper site map for the search engines to index all of your web pages, in addition to submitting it to Google and Bing, will most likely help the search engines understand your website more clearly, leading to higher rankings

Google & Bing Web Master Tools

The first thing you will want to do is claim your website on Google Web Masters for the urls you have. Google considers www.yoursite.com and https://www.yoursite.com different domains. Therefore, you need to claim both, utilizing Google and Bing Web Master tools is one of the most critical factors for keeping up to date with the maintenance and status of your website. Google Web Master tools will inform you of how many web pages of your website they have indexed, any crawl errors or internal errors on your site, and links you have going to your site. Keeping up and monitoring your google web master tools is a necessary component of a successful website and marketing campaign.
Some of the major areas you will want to look into on Google Web Masters are:
Indexed Pages:
Google shows you how many pages they have indexed from your website. The more quality indexed pages Google indexes, the more likely you will generate more SEO traffic.

 
Search Analytics:
Search Analytics show you how much organic traffic your website is generating and what keywords are generating that traffic. This is incredibly useful for understanding your SEO traffic.

 
Backlinks:
You can see how many sites are linking to you and how many links each site is giving you as well with the links section of Google Web Masters.

 
Crawl Errors:
You want to make sure you have as few or even zero crawl errors if possible. Google crawls your website and will let you know if they encounter any major issues crawling your website.

 
Useful Resources:
https://moz.com/learn/seo/on-page-factors
https://backlinko.com/on-page-seo