What Is On-page SEO? (SEO foundation)

On-Page Optimization

Again guys, welcome back to SEO foundations.

In this blog, we’re going to cover on-page optimization.

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to:

• Describe the two broad categories of ranking signals
• Identify best practices for on-page signals such as title tags, header tags, URLs, alt text, and others
• Identify on-page SEO practices that you should avoid
• Finally describe how natural language processing aims to understand the meaning behind the text

Defining On-Page Optimization

On-page optimization. As the name suggests, is the practice of optimizing web pages to rank higher and get relevant traffic from the search engine.

On-page optimization includes both content and HTML source code optimization.

SEO can be very complex.

Therefore, when you’re trying to understand it for the first time, I find it very easy just to break it up into general concepts that you might already have an understanding of.

When you look at the hundreds of signals that go into SEO, they can be broken up into either relevancy or because sometimes it’s both popularity.

Relevancy (On-page factors)

• Title tags
• Meta description
• Header tags
• URLs Duplicate content
• IMG alt text
• Keywords

Popularity (Off-page factors)

• Inbound links
• Outbound links
• Engaging content
• Reviews
• Citations

So, relevancy and popularity, out of all these signals fit into one of these two things.

We’re going to break all the signals we have into these two areas.

In this section, we’re going to talk about the on-page factors(Relevancy) that are because these are the factors that you have a direct impact upon

And you can make a small tweak and have a big impact on organic traffic with your on-page relevancy factors

On-page factors

The primary on-page relevancy factors that I’ll cover in this lesson are

• Title tags and meta descriptions
• Header tags (which are used for headlines and subheadings)
• website URLs and URL structure
• Image alt text
• Internal links
• Keyword usage
• Sitemap

Title tags

Firstly, Let’s start with one of my favorites and that is the title tag.

This is also called a page title.

The page title is not shown on the page.

Now, rather it is displayed on the browser tab and this is what makes it highly important is that in addition to being displayed on the browser tab.

It is also the title tag or the page title that is shown on the text in the Google search results as the link to the page.

The page title influences both the click-through rates and people’s first impressions of our website.

Meta Description

Secondly, Next up, we have the Meta Description.

Now the Meta Description can be a bit confusing.

It is in the code and it does not influence rankings but it does influence clicks.

People will see your snippet or your page information in the search engine results.

That gray text is the Meta Description.

If you don’t have a meta description, then it may pull information from the page.

You can affect this and improve the chances of your meta description appearing if you write a short descriptive phrase of the content or the purpose of the page and just because we edit these elements does not guarantee that they will show up.

I often say that we affect the change but we cannot control it.

This is because the search engine may override your changes and show different content in these areas.

Sometimes it may help and it might be a better description but many times it’s not.

Header Tags

Thirdly, now let’s go to the next element, the header tags.

These are also referred to as the heading and sub-heading.

And this is how HTML was built when the web was first created.

It enables a logical hierarchy of content.

So, starting with the headline, then displaying a sub-heading, and then sub-heading after that.

The idea here is that you are establishing a hierarchy of information.

So you start with the H1.

Like a newspaper, there is only one main headline per page.

It describes the main purpose of the page.

Then a sub-heading, the H2.

This is how you break the sub-content into sub-categories.

Obviously, you will want to use a keyword in there as well.

You see, by describing the purpose of the page in the headline and then again in a sub-heading,

you are naturally going to use your primary and secondary keywords because you are going to associate them with the product, the purpose, and the benefit.

The key is to keep it short.

You see after the headline is the sub-categories, the H2s and then your H3s are typically used as a paragraph heading.

Now, putting the keyword and these headings alone does not make your page optimized.

Remember, the purpose is to provide a quick reference for people to find the content they need in seconds.

So, short, explanatory heading and sub-heading, paragraph headings are very effective, and naturally, you will be using keywords to help people locate the information that is most important to them.

URLs and URL structure

Now, if we go back to the search engine results page, the SERP, there is another element in the listing.

The page title is large blue text, the Meta description is gray text.

Now the green text is the URL of the page that is listed.

This is the address of the page.

Just like the address for your home, the internet knows that the URL is the address for that page.

This is extremely important for SEO for a variety of reasons.

The most important though is your keyword usage.

I like to make sure that I have at least one relevant word in the URL.

Now also here, keep it short.

One of the worst things you can do is have a URL full of keywords or even worse hyphenate them all.

Remember, people use these URLs. They provide context for the page.

People also copy and paste URLs into mobile messages, emails, and social links.

So, it is extremely important to keep these short, succinct, and I like to say readable.

Now, I’ve just briefly touched on the importance of the URL and now let’s look at the URL structure.

www. example.com /seo/

First, let’s start with the primary core of the URL, the domain name.

In the example with the URL, I have here, example.com, that’s the domain name.

So, this is the first thing that people see with your online business.

Now, beyond the internet, this is going to be what’s in all of your ads, emails, brochures, business cards, and online social profiles, all of your marketing efforts are going to drive people to this domain.

There’s a lot of advice about buying or using domains that have your keywords in them and unfortunately, domains have been being sold for decades.

Therefore, there’s less chance of finding a domain with the keywords you want.

Now the search engines don’t make the keyword used in the domain primary ranking signals. So that’s good.

However, the domain is your business.

It needs to be memorable. If you have a very, spammy-looking domain name with multiple words and hyphens or one that’s hard to spell or confusing, people are going to make an initial impression of that.

Therefore, make sure you have something that’s going to make a great first impression.

Here’s the rule for a domain name.

Something that’s easy to spell and easy pronounce.

Ideally, sure it’s something you can type and share, something you’re going to be able to put on a business card and be proud of.

Not something that you bought primarily because you want it for SEO reasons and you think with that you’re going to succeed.

As an example, just think about Amazon. Its domain name says nothing about books and yet it grew to be one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world.

The same with Alibaba or Google, their domain names were not the keyword but their marketing and branding built their company.

Now, everything after the domain is a subdirectory.

This is based on your website organization.

As an example, if you have a website selling shoes then the subdirectory can be called shoes.

It’s easy, right? The subdirectory is the folder that contains the relevant files or pages for that group.

Think of a file folder with documents inside.

The file folder is usually based on a major category of content or products.

Now, inside the folder are individual documents or pages.

These files or pages usually come back to the subdirectory.

In this example, you see the file.html

The next step in optimizing the URL is to name the page in a way that explains the content of the page.

To use our e-commerce shoe website, a page name would usually be a specific product name.

This way you would end up with domain name forward slash “/” shoe, as the category, forward slash brand name running show, insert that here.

Image Alt Text

If you’ve ever looked at the HTML that makes up the instruction of the page, you’ll understand a bit more about how search engines get the information from the page.

The text on the page in the markup, such as the headings provide instructions as to where the text is located, the importance, and the prominence of the text, in addition to the arrangement of the overall page.

HTML is a set of instructions for a browser to assemble the page and the search engines use that as well.

Now, search engine spiders cannot see images. As the internet developed, many attributes were added to provide for accessibility and additional features.

Users that are sight impaired cannot see images and the alternative text tag describes the image.

Further, there are many times when our brand width isn’t strong and not all of the images will load.

In that case, we need the alt text description to provide the context of the image and its purpose.

Search engines use this alt text description to gain additional context about the page, the content of the image, and its purpose.

Internal links

Now, we have an entire section on links but at this point, I just want to cover internal links.

An internal link is a link from one page on your website to another page of your own website.

Now, this is important from a relevancy perspective.

You’ll see an internal link in your main navigation.

You’ll likely have a link that says “Home”, one says “Contact us”, or “About our company.”

What you’re showing to search engines and to humans is that this section, if you click on this link, is about our company or this is where you find our contact information.

You see, these links are not votes like external links.

However, they provide relevancy and context to the information on your own website.

Keyword usage

Let’s dive in a little more on keywords.

When a search engine crawls and processes your website, it doesn’t simply look for the instances of specific keywords.

It’s a lot more complex than that.

It’s using a technology called Natural Language Processing.

Natural language processing uses algorithms to try to understand the meaning of the text.

You see, search engine processing is attempting to be human.

This is the same way that people see and hear words and we’re using the words to find the meaning expressed in words.

Similarly, when a search engine goes to your website, that may see keywords but it’s looking for the context of those words.

You may say football but just having the word football repeated throughout your website isn’t going to help you rank specifically for football.

What do you need to do and what is more common is actual human conversation happens very naturally.

When we talk about football, we use naturally additional words such as goal and referee and world cup.

Therefore, Google and the other search engines are going to take these into account.

By usage of other synonyms and other common words, you present the context of a bigger, broader idea for your website.

Sitemaps

A sitemap allows both humans and computers to better understand the structure and hierarchy of a site.

The next site signal that we have is sitemaps.

Now, there are two kinds of sitemaps.

There are the sitemaps that are for humans and there is the sitemap that is for search engines, robots, crawlers, or spiders.

HTML sitemap

The one that is for humans is called an HTML sitemap.

You’ve probably seen these before.

The link is generally in the footer of a website.

If you click on it, it shows you the major sections of the website, and provides some search functionality but looking at it as a human.

It shows you the hierarchy of the website and where to find important information.

It shows how everything fits together.

XML sitemap

Now, there’s something else that exists called an XML sitemap.

It’s not linked from any page of your website but exists as an independent file on your server.

Hence, this is something you can see but it is formatted for search engine spiders.

Using a programming language called XML.

It shows the hierarchy and the priority of each of the URLs of the website, every page, every document, and every image, and it also shows the date that each page was last updated or changed.

On-Page Don’ts

Now at this point, we’ve covered a lot of things that are important and things that you should be doing when optimizing your on-page content.

Now, let’s go in a different direction and cover things that you should not be doing such as:

• Keyword stuffing
• Hidden text
• Repetitive anchor text
• Cloaking

Keyword Stuffing

Firstly, there is keyword stuffing.

Now, back in the early days of search engine optimization, people used to increase the instances of words on the page.

Now, this is well before natural language processing.

At that time, search engines were looking for occurrences of specific words.

Well, search engines, they’re very smart about this.

What may have been worded 20 years ago or 10 years ago, keyword stuffing does not work,

You’re not going to rank better for any given phrase by including it a dozen or more times on the page.

In fact, you might get an over-optimization penalty by constantly repeating the same word over and over.

Focus on writing content that engages with your visitors and uses language naturally.

Hidden text

Only search engines can read the hidden text

Hidden text can negatively affect website ranking

Secondly, hidden text.

Unfortunately, I still see this. This is when you write content that is solely for search engines and not for people.

Now, typically it is attempted by writing a lot of repetitive keywords as text, coloring it white, and placing it against a white background.

You see, this was developed as another way to add more keyword-stuffed text without the user seeing the overuse of keywords.

Now, it didn’t work too well in the past and definitely does not work today.

This tactic backfires in two ways.

First, search engines can tell when it’s white text on a white background.

It’s easy to tell from a computer science point of view.

Search engines read the HTML and in the HTML are the instructions for colors.

When you hide text, modern search engines are smart enough to figure it out, probably better than a human.

Now secondly it’s done to hide repetitive keyword stuffed text, which is the second thing against you.

These outdated, unprofessional tactics will most likely get a website penalized by the search engines.

Repetitive Anchor Text

Thirdly, repetitive anchor text.

You may have followed a link to a page when looking for a business or information and instead of the information you want, you get a page that doesn’t feel like it was written by people.

Every sentence is redundant and repetitive, and almost every keyword is linked even when there doesn’t need to be a link.

It confuses the flow of the information on the page.

Now again, this used to be a tactic that sometimes would word but it’s no longer helpful.

Search engines and their natural language processing algorithms have advanced significantly.

They can tell when something’s not readable.

When something is probably intended for machines and rankings but not for people, search engines will figure it out.

Please don’t waste time on redundant links trying to inflate the relevance of your links and pages.

Cloaking

Lastly, cloaking.

Cloaking is the idea of showing one thing to the search engines and something entirely different to the users.

Now, this is related to the rest of the tactics I just covered, it’s something that is used to work.

But it was against the search engine guidelines.

Well, it may have a word if a search engine discovered it on your website, you could be penalized or dropped from the search engine results.

Perfectly Optimized Page

Now, we’ve covered all of the most important on-page optimization factors.

Let’s take a look at what the theoretically, perfectly optimized page would look like.

In this example, we can see many of these elements being used together.

You can also see that the base key phrase “digital camera” is being repeated but always included with a specific context.

First, at the top of the page is the URL that has digital cameras in the address.

The page title follows using the context of the information and adding the word reviews.

You can also see at the top of the page that the main navigation and secondary navigation, also called the breadcrumb navigation, provides the context for the page’s location within the entire website and natural keyword usage.

The H1 headline is the key phrase but also happens to simply be the best title for the content of the page.

The subsequent subheadings provide additional information such as ratings, recommendations, and features.

The links provide relevant ways to access additional content, the image utilizes alt text, and there are also clear call-to-action that provide relevant offers to visitors.

As you can see, the context of all of the content is very strong and sends a clear relevancy signal to both search engines and readers.

SEO Factors

To conclude this section, I’d like to cover the top influencing factors.

Now sometimes you may find these as lists but I found it a bit more practical to separate them into categories.

Typically, every year you’ll find these collections of lists from surveys, experts, or speculation.

Some are from testing but honestly, you can’t ever truly test a search engine as they change a little bit with every algorithm.

So, the best thing is to take from these lists factors that are the tried and true factors over the years that have worked consistently.

Also, those tactics not only make your website more effective with users, but they also tend to do well with search engines.

So, if a tactic serves that dual purpose, it’s a good tactic.

Therefore, these are not exclusive and have-to lists for every situation, but guides and indicators for you to use.

Top Ranking Factors

On-page factors

The top on-page factors from surveys, opinions, and data are these:

• A relevant page title
• Page heading
• Anchor text links
• A keyword-based URL
• A keyword or contextual file name such as page name
• Image name
• PDF file name
• Alt text in images

and finally, what you do with the content on a page to make it more readable:

• Lists
• Bullet points
• Bolded text

Off-page factors

The top factors for off-page linking tend to contain these items:

• Total number of domains linking to you
• Number of highly influential domains linking to you
• Number of unique domains IP addresses
• Total backlinks without no follow limits
• Total relevant anchor text in links to you
• Finally, the types and context of keywords in anchor text links

The domain also contributes factors to your overall ranking such as the age of the domain which would include ownership information such as the length of time owned and operated by a company.

The real business information tied to that domain such as the business address is the same as the business registration address for the domain.

In addition, the signals from social accounts drive visits to the domain.

Functionally, the search engines also utilize some attribution based on the quality of programming of the website.

For instance, taking care of the basic search engine protocols of the robot.txt file, XML sitemap, and HTTPS protocol.

Websites that implement these features have shown that they are familiar with search engine guidelines and protocols.

Now, one of the changes over the past few years has been the implementation of PageSpeed as an increasing ranking factor.

Slow-loading pages with a lot of extraneous code that slow the delivery of the page will be panelized as they take away from the user experience.

Optimizing the page code, and speeding up the load time of the page can directly impact your rankings and this is closely related to the mobile-friendliness of your website.

If your website is not mobile-friendly, it will be limited in visibility as Google’s primary index is focused on mobile devices and mobile delivery.

Behavioral factors are the newest factors and with the advent of artificial intelligence, it is making determining the intent and is making determining easier for a search engine to derive a judgment of relevancy based on interaction.

While the extent of these signals is not fully known, it is suspected that they are minor but growing in importance.

These include the number of users that search for a brand name, or businesses name, and go to that results showing brand awareness.

Also, the number of direct visits bypassing search, time on page, pages per session which is also called the depth of visit, and lastly, the behavior of a searcher from the results page:

How many results are clicked, and how many times do they return to the results?

This evaluation is looking to judge if the results presented were satisfactory or deficient for that query.

Key Takeaways

• The two broad categories of ranking signals are relevance(on-page signals) and popularity(off-page signals)
• Important on-page factors are the title tag, heading, subheading, URLs, and alt text.
• Avoid keyword stuffing, hidden text, repetitive anchor text, and cloaking while optimizing on-page factors.
• Natural language processing is the technology that aims to understand the intent and semantic structure behind text written by humans.