What Is On-Site SEO?

One vital goal for websites is that they rank well on Google and other search engines when people search for their products or services. If your website isn’t ranking well, it doesn’t matter how eye catching its design is or informative its content is because your customers won’t see it. Addressing problems with on-site SEO will go a long way to fixing that problem.

What Is On-Site SEO?

On-site SEO is “the practice of optimizing elements on a website (as opposed to links elsewhere on the Internet and other external signals collectively known as “off-site SEO“) in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic from search engines.” On-site SEO allows search engines and, via them, users to know and understand what a webpage is about and whether it answers a question they have or offers a product or service they are looking for.

Search engines crawl the web and index it all of its individual pages in order to make sense of it all so individual people don’t have to search blindly. Search engine optimization has a number of components, all of which aid search engines in determining how relevant the information on the page would be to users using specific terms to search. What are those components?

KeywordsKeywords were once synonymous with SEO, but search engines have grown more sophisticated over time partly in response to people trying to game them with practices like keyword stuffing. The new algorithms are designed to determine if the content matches what the user is looking for. Keywords are a part of that because they are essentially topic markers. You want your website to use the most relevant keywords in the correct way – to show search engines what the content is about.

Content – If keywords are topic or subject markers, content is the examination or exploration of those topics. Content is king in today’s SEO world. Google in particular has incentivized content that is well developed, useful, user-friendly, and unique. Google will penalize websites that lift content from elsewhere on your website or on the internet. And it will reward with higher search rankings a page with authoritative content that it deems will be satisfying to users.

Mobile Friendliness – In response to mobile traffic overtaking desktop traffic, Google specifically incentivized websites that are designed to accommodate mobile users by tanking the rankings of any sites that were mobile unfriendly. If your website cannot easily be read or navigated on mobile devices, you need to address this flaw right away or your site will not rank well.

There are other on-site SEO elements that also factor into how well a website ranks. These include page load speed, schema data, URL structure, and page metadata.

What all of the above do when they are used correctly for on-site SEO is to enhance the user’s experience online. As a result of the SEO they will find the information or the products or services that they are seeking and that will meet their needs. They will be able to locate it quickly, understand it, and interact with it easily.

If your website is not optimized, you will be not be visible to your full audience and will be missing out on customer interactions and sales. SEO is important. If you would like to discuss improving your on-site SEO, we would love to talk with you about what we at Corporate Conversions do and how we can help your site rank better.