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The process of modifying a website’s page content, tags, and internal links to maximise traffic and search visibility is known as ‘on-page SEO’, with the factors of on-page SEO defining any features present on your business website that are seen to influence your overall ranking position within the organic search results.
In other words, on-page SEO is a technique for improving the understanding that the search engines have of your business’ website pages.

On-page SEO factors are changes you can make to your website that may positively or negatively affect your search engine rankings. This includes your website’s technological setup, usability, and content such as blog posts, landing pages, and meta descriptions – among other things. These factors are known to impact your performance within the search results, makings them features that you can improve for higher search rankings.

In the past, webmasters focused solely on gaining backlinks to their site to improve their rankings and manipulate the search engines. As Google’s ranking signals have improved over the year, proving that fewer quality backlinks are more effective than a large quantity of lower-quality one, it is now apparent that on-page changes, plus high-quality authoritative backlinks, are essential to your rankings.

The goal of every SEO plan is to achieve the highest possible search engine rankings, improving your online visibility and the overall performance of your business website. To achieve this, we all work to create websites that Google’s algorithm will favour. That’s what search engine optimisation is all about.

Essential Factors Effecting Your On-Page SEO

The key components of your website should be the main focus of any successful on-page SEO strategy. The following are some of the most crucial points to consider when creating a successful on-page SEO campaign for your company website.

Site Speed

Site speed is a key component in on-page ranking. Users don’t like to waste time waiting for pages to load, so Google favours sites with quick loading times. Use Google’s Page Speed Insights tool if you’re unsure of how quickly (or slowly) your site loads. By highlighting points where your site’s speed can be improved, this useful tool will help you to focus your efforts.

Defining Purpose

Typically, your goal as a business owner would be to have your potential customers come to your website to convert, or to learn more about the products and services that you have to offer. To do this, they need to know what the page is about!
To define the purpose of your page, start by creating strong and enticing title tags and meta descriptions. These are what your potential customers are likely to see first, influencing whether or not they choose to navigate to your page. Your meta titles and descriptions should be clear and concise, as to clearly convey the purpose of your page and the information that readers can expect to find there.
Within the main body of your content (and any image alt tags, if necessary), provide any relative information and work to answer any questions that your readers may have. Ensure that the user leaves your site knowing what the purpose of your article/landing page was, and hopefully they will have converted!

Content Quality 

As previously mentioned, it’s likely to assume that your potential customers will be visiting your company website to find more information on the products or services that you’re offering. No matter the question that they need answering or the details they’re looking for, it’s crucial to create quality content that meets their needs.

Your website pages are read and reviewed by search engines like Google, and the content that you publish will heavily influence how well it ranks for any given search query. In order to effectively reach your audience, your content must be educational, simple to read, and focused on the appropriate keywords.

Along with producing high-quality material, you should also get rid of or fix any low-quality content already present on your website. Thin material might seriously hurt your SEO. To keep your content in good form, take the time to locate these pages and assess how they can be improved to better the quality of information being presented to your readers.

Put simply, high quality content is essential to your search engine rankings because that’s what the user is looking for! A user searches for a product, service or a question and your page content should provide the answer. If you have a vast amount of knowledge on your industry that could be useful to potential customers, this could give you an edge over your competitors, as you will be viewed as a trusted source.
Similarly to news broadcasts, which bring you the latest news as it happens, your site content is only high quality if people are searching for it and engaging with it. There is so much information on the internet as it is, so aim to write content about topics that have only briefly been discussed, and add extra value with new information and rich media. Writing in depth content about a specific topic is considered good practice, as Google’s aim is for the user to find the answer to their question in as few clicks as possible.

No matter how good your content is, if it can’t be shared then it won’t be successful. Adding social sharing icons to every landing page and blog post of your site enables users to share content to their social channels, potentially driving traffic to your site from their followers. Avoid creating content such as slide shows and member-only content, as these cannot be shared, and will not improve your rankings.

Keyword Optimisation

The language you use on your website is the simplest approach to let Google know that the information there responds to a user’s query.

Each page of your site should be unique and discuss a topic in depth so the keywords you are targeting should be similar or variants of the same keywords. It is natural that you should use these keywords within the main body of your page, so it reads naturally.

Ensure that it doesn’t sound like you are overusing key terms to manipulate rankings, as this could lead to penalties and other negative effects from Google. Your keyword targets for that page should also be within the title tag and your page URL and in the text of the page as discussed above.
Content that is seen to include relevant keywords are more likely to be pertinent to the search, so ensure that you are choosing the right keywords for your content and SEO strategy as a whole.

To put it briefly, you must be aware of the search phrases used by your intended audience when creating content. Always do your homework to ensure you don’t miss any opportunities.

Friendly Navigation/URL Structure 

Although external linking is an important part of SEO, internal linking is just as important. Defining a clear site architecture is ideal to help categorise your pages and content. Clean URLs can also help people to better understand what your page is about, both in the SERPS as well as when they are browsing your website. This can also help Google to understand the context of the page, for example:

https://www.weareinfront.com/services/seo – This URL structure tells Google that the page is about SEO services that In Front Digital offers, as it is categorised under the ‘Services’ category, rather than just ‘/SEO’ which could be an article or other media content.

https://www.weareinfront.com/category/a464ggs – This URL provides no additional information to Google or users as you are unable to identify what the page is about before clicking on it, which adds no additional value.

Each page of your website should be easily accessible and linked to other relevant content pieces and categories. When defining your website navigation structure, ensure that all page’s link back to their categories and subcategories accordingly. Linking back to your homepage on every page can be easily done by adding a link on the logo on every page in the header.

An effective site structure makes it easier for Google and your users alike to understand your website and explore its contents.

Search appearance

SEO heavily relies on how your website appears in the search results. The things you do to improve your search appearance are part of your site, even though the search results aren’t. Because of this, we regard structured data, meta descriptions, and SEO titles as key components of on-page SEO that should be fully optimised with your keywords and potential customers in mind.

Meta Data

As mentioned previously, title tags and meta descriptions aid Google in understanding the purpose of your website. However, they also have a significant impact on your CTRs.
Better meta descriptions help searchers to grasp the content of your website, which encourages more clickthrough. They can act as a useful tool that shouldn’t be easily disregarded.

Defining the contents and purpose of your page can be beneficial to both search engines and users alike, so it is best practice to ensure that your company works to properly optimise your meta descriptions for SEO.

Video and Image Content

To make your website more visually appealing, consider adding quality photographs and videos that will elevate your content and attract the attention of your target audience. When carried out well, there are a number of SEO advantages.

By giving the images that you use across your website informative titles, captions, and alt tags, you’ll work to improve site accessibility, meaning a larger audience can benefit from your website. Additionally, there is a possibility that your photographs will appear in the Google Image search results. To learn more about image SEO, read our dedicated article.

A little more work goes into adding videos to your website than adding photographs, but enhancing your videos for SEO can bring a number of benefits to those willing to learn, helping to diversify your content and improve your search engine rankings simultaneously.

The most significant on-page SEO variables have been covered. Make sure your website is functioning properly and that your technical SEO is up to standard before anything else. Second, develop content that is user-centred and keyword-focused. Thirdly, improve your website’s usability and performance to make it easier for users and search engines to navigate.

Since each of these elements contributes to your website, you should work on them to ensure that your on-page SEO is the best that it can be!