Essentially, there are two types of SEO, or search engine optimization: on-page SEO and off page SEO.
On-Page SEO vs. Off-Page SEO
On-page SEO is what your site communicates to Internet searchers and search engines. Off-Page SEO is what other sites say about your site, which boosts your overall search engine authority.
Optimize your On-Page SEO
To have the best on-page SEO, you need to optimize each page of your site for search engines. There are a lot of components on page SEO, so we wanted to give you some tips on how to best optimize across the board, as well as dig into how each of these components can help more people find your site.
You may be thinking, How do I fix SEO for my entire site? I have tons of webpages— that will take forever. Don’t stress. The answer is simpler than you think.
The first thing we recommend as an SEO audit. An audit can tell you what your highest-performing web pages are, if your sites are being blocked by any search engines, and other helpful information that you can use to better fine-tune your SEO.
This is what you and your marketing team need to do for an SEO audit:
- Export each of your site pages into an Excel spreadsheet.
- Sort that data by your most frequently visited pages.
- Determine the keyword category for each page, and put that category name in a column beside the page name.
- You can add another column for more specific keywords, just make sure that they’re relevant.
We can make sure you have a no-stress SEO Audit.
If you have many pages, focus on the most important pages of your site. But if you only have several web pages, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be doing an audit of the entire site. Once you know the keywords and content driving people to your web pages, it can be disseminated throughout the rest of your site to improve your on-page SEO.
SEO Improvements
Here are the areas you need to focus along when it comes to on-page SEO improvements, along with some tips on how to optimize them.
- Webpage Titles: Strong titles will help you get more clicks through to your website. Make sure to include target keywords towards the beginning of your title, and keep each title below 65 characters in length.
- Meta Descriptions: Meta descriptions are shown under your website titles in user search results. To optimize their impact, use a relevant keyword or phrase. But remember: this is for a human, not an algorithm. So, try to make it straightforward and appealing.
- Headings & Web Copy: If people see the terms in prominent places on your site, they’ll stay there. Be sure to be conversational and natural in the way keywords are used. If you just dump a bunch of repetitive words and phrases in your web content, Google will be able to tell— and your search rankings will get worse before they get better.
- Images Titles & Alt Text: When you include pictures on your website, you can title them. When someone hovers over a picture on your site, a small box will appear with words in it. Those words are the alt-text. In this sample image tag, the description and the image title tag are highlighted:
- <img class=”alignCenter shadow” src=”image.jpg” alt=”image-description” title=”image tooltip“/>
- Let’s say that you sell handmade bags, and you’ve uploaded some pictures to your site. Instead of leaving the area between the quotation marks empty, or putting a very generic word like “bags” there, you can make it more specific and detailed: “handmade-bags-women-denver”, so pictures of your bags come up when searchers use relevant keywords.
- URLs: You can do the same thing for your site URLs that you did for your images to help your on-page SEO. The URL slug is highlighted in this sample URL. http://www.sample.com/URLslug1234
- Just like with your images, you can use keywords (separated by dashes) to optimize your URLs for on-page SEO.
You Can Do It
Optimizing your on-page SEO across your site can be daunting, but a little extra legwork on the front end goes a long way. If you focus on staying consistent and making the user experience relevant and valuable across your content, you’re well on your way to having great SEO, both on-page and off.
