Introduction to On-Page SEO
Meta data refers to the data within the head of the code of each page. There are two very important types of Meta data for SEO. They are the Meta Title tag
and the Meta Description tag.
Meta Title Tag.
The Meta Title tag appears within the code of a page and should be a representation of what the page is about. The Meta Title tag is used by Google as the clickable part
in search listings so it is one of the things that can help your click through rate. It is also a ranking factor so it is recommended that at least one keyword
is included within it.
Meta Description Tag.
The Meta Description tag also appears within the code of a page. This is used by Google to make up the text under your listing in Google's search results so it can
also impact the pages click through rate.
Content
Headings.
HTML content headings are an important part of optimising a page. By using headers you can help to explain to Google what the page is about. The H1 header especially
needs to focus on one of your most important target keywords. The H1 heading can be used by Google sometimes if it thinks it describes the pages content better than the Meta Title.
Content quality.
The quality of the content on your site is a hugely important part of on-page SEO. If you have spelling or grammar errors on a page that can have a detrimental effect. Google's guidelines
suggest that website owners should ensure that their content is of a quality high enough to meet their E-E-A-T quality rater guidelines. Google employs
people to visit websites manually and compare them to these guidelines to see if they meet the standards.
Internal and external links
Navigation structure.
How your navigation is put together can have an impact on how well your sites pages rank individually as well as your site as a whole. A structure that is intuitive to
use is recommended as is including your most important pages that need to rank well within your navigation.
Internal linking.
Internal links separate from your navigation will help Google's algorithm to form connections between pages and to spread crucial PageRank to important pages.
External linking.
Linking out to external sites where relevant will help your users and in turn help with the usefulness of your page which is important to Google.
Schema markup
Schema or structured data.
Schema markup, sometimes referred to as structured data, is used to provide additional information to search engines about a page.
Google then uses this data to enable additional search result features and enhancements. This can be useful for getting recipes or reviews to show in search results.
It's also important for featuring product details such as price or stock levels or adding details to articles like author and published date.
Image optimisation
Optimising images with Alt tags.
Images are another part on on-page SEO. They need to be named accurately with good file names and Alt tags added. This can help search engines understand what is contained
within an image and its relevance in relation to the content.
Page speed is a factor but so is customer satisfaction so images need to be compressed so that they load quickly and don't slow up the page as a whole. They also need
to be of a legible high enough quality.
Mobile friendliness
Ensuring your site works for mobile users.
Having a mobile friendly site has been necessary for years. For some sites the majority of traffic will come from users on mobile devices. To perform well for
mobile searches websites need to load fast and provide a good mobile experience. Google provides a tool to test pages as well as information on issues with Google Search Console.
Google actually crawls the mobile version of a page first in most cases so it's important for a mobile version of a site to present the content that you want to rank.
Experience
Page experience, Core web vitals and HTTPS.
Page experience is an important part of optimising a website. Google provides information on how a site is doing in Search Console. It will show you
information on how a site performs by highlighting errors with Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) of page renderings as well as Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) of a page in the browser.
HTTPS security of a website is also important. Pages should be served over HTTPS. It has been called a small ranking factor by Google and is pretty much
a standard feature of websites these days.
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