A Quick Guide to On-Page SEO

Search engine optimisation can seem a complex beast, and explaining the various process to individuals that aren’t accustomed to the industry can be a difficult task. Roughly speaking, SEO can be broken down into 2 main sections – on page and off page. On page refers to the techniques that you can apply directly on the web page itself, and off page refers to the techniques employed externally to the web page/site (these tend to be the more complex).

In this post I’m going to be explaining some of the basics of on-page SEO. These basic, yet vital aspects are essential for online success and should never be overlooked, on any website.

URL’s

A websites URL (uniform resource locator) describes the site or web page to a visitor or search engine. Keeping your page URLs relevant, neat, and as accurate as possible is key when it comes to site performance on search engines.

Like I just mentioned, the URL of a web page needs to be descriptive but as brief as possible, internet explorer (now Microsoft Edge) has a character limit for a URL of 2,083 but try not to go over 100, and if your website's structure has multiple levels of files and navigation etc, your URL string should reflect this with properly named folders and subfolders.

So, for example if I had a page on my website that talks about football, which is within a subsection about sport, my URL should look something like this:

www.mywebsite.com/sport/football

Not like this…

www.mywebsite.com/jsessionid=G3J0DLxbVqpRJhbVpPST3xh3YLbpRz31Tyy7Wddhr3GYdT1vTCLT!2100740619?placeID=0&keyword=football_mode=false&externalCallMode=false&breadCrumbsBase=%3Ca+href%3D%22%2
F%22+title%3D%22Home%22%3EHome%3C%2Fa%3E&accredited=true&seminar_id=14442&sportType Filter=0&ins_spec=false

You get the point!

Meta Descriptions

While meta description tags are not overly important for search engine rankings, they are very important in terms of gaining user clicks from search engine results pages. These short paragraphs of content are your opportunity to persuade searchers to click on your website by providing them with an overview of your pages content.

The meta descriptions of your pages should be compelling enough to make the searcher want to click through to your website, do this by including words and phrases that you think people who might benefit from your website might be searching for. As far a character length goes, you should aim for between 150-160 characters.

A more in-depth look at meta descriptions and how to actually code them into your website correctly can be found here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/meta-description

Page Content

Having exceptional content on your website is paramount (I know, you have heard this all before), but your content is what makes your website worthy of a search result position! From an SEO perspective, all good content has have two key attributes. The content on your site must supply a demand i.e. it must answer a question that people are searching for, and must be linkable i.e. it must be so good that people want to share it with their friends and colleagues.

Now writing content can be a pain, we all know this – but it’s a necessary evil that must be done correctly. So to make it that little bit easier here is a link to an article that breaks it down into much more manageable chunks!

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/ingredients-of-great-content/

Some More Useful Links

If you want to learn more about on page SEO, follow the links below to find additional resources.

https://moz.com/learn/seo/on-page-factors
http://www.searchmetrics.com/glossary/on-page-optimization/