What is on-page optimization?

Learn the essentials of on-page optimization to strengthen your website's SEO foundation and boost your organic visibility.

Demystifying tech lingo is the purpose of today's article.

On-page optimization is a crucial part of any SEO strategy. It includes optimizations made directly to the elements of a webpage to improve rankings in search engines and provide a better user experience.

Translation: getting ranked by search engines starts with every page in your website.

Understanding on-page SEO

On-page SEO is about improving the different parts of a webpage so that both people and search engines can easily figure out what the page is about. Make each page more user-friendly and providing helpful information.

On-page SEO is completely under your control, but careful with going overboard focusing only on search engines. “Over-optimizing” your webpages can harm user experience and lead to undesired results.

When you create a good user experience by focusing on their needs vs. your own, you have likely created the perfect experience for a search engine. Search engines aim to display the most relevant result to a query in the most easy-to-absorb format and in the fastest way possible by creating content accessible to most users. 

Aim to design your content to meet user needs, deliver information effectively, and remain accessible to all users, including those with disabilities and without a reliable internet connection.

Content elements for on-page SEO

Content can be anything from texts, videos, images, sound clips, or their combinations. Search engines can use the words, associations between them, phrases you link to from one page to another, and anything else that renders for their spiders (software that scans your pages).

Not every page has to rank or be optimized. Homepages may only need to appear for brand searches. Prioritize optimizing product, service, and category pages. Use the homepage and navigation to pass authority to these pages through text links.

Technical on-page SEO elements

These refer to non-visible elements search engines use to understand your page and page experience. In other words, the backend.

Search engines can determine if a page experience is a direct conversion or contextual and informative based on the clickable elements (links, buttons, calls to action) and the action being taken.

Also, page speed provides a good user experience, but SEO-wise, there are more important things.

Meta robots are meta tags that tell a search engine if they should index or not index the page, and follow or nofollow the links on the page. Make sure your web team do these correctly, and they’re always situational.

Schema is the code way of saying what the page is about and what the user will experience. Helps search engines understand what you’re providing to searches. You can define just about anything, from the area you offer a service in and what that service is. There is schema for hours of operation, ticket sales, reviews, recipes, videos on a page, and pretty much everything. 

Ok this last part got too technical. Just make sure you review these things with your web team, knowing the tech details is not required to make them see you are on top of things.

Key Takeaways 

Optimizing just a few of these elements can provide a rankings boost. Addressing the on-page SEO basics discussed here will put your pages in the best possible position to rank. You’ll see improved organic visibility and more qualified traffic to your site.

Read that last line again. More qualified traffic to you. Now this is the real purpose of your website.

Reach out to us to talk about bringing more qualified traffic to your website, phone, or front door.