Optimizing your website for search engines is an important way to get more traffic and increase conversions. Search engine optimization (SEO) increases your site’s visibility in search results, which means you’ll receive more traffic from people looking for businesses like yours. Here are six components of onsite SEO that can help boost your rankings:
What is onsite SEO?
Onsite SEO (or on-page SEO) is a broad term that refers to all of the elements on your website (unlike off-page SEO you do elsewhere) that can be optimized for search engines. This can mean tweaking the title tags, meta descriptions, and alt text for images, adding relevant keywords in URL structure and page titles, using structured data markup (schema.org), including links to other relevant websites, etc.
Optimizing page titles
Page titles are one of the most important components of onsite SEO. The title tag should be descriptive and compelling. It should contain keywords relevant to a page’s content (but also make sense in context). For example, if you’re writing an article about how to lose weight fast, you might want to use keywords like “lose weight” or “weight loss.” But don’t repeat these words multiple times in your page title; otherwise, it may look spammy. Also, avoid using symbols and numbers at the beginning of your title unless they’re necessary for the comprehension of what’s being said—for instance, using an asterisk (*) before some text can help indicate that it’s been modified from its original form (i.e., “Updated Title”).
Your page titles should be between 70–100 characters long: any longer than this will cause your title tag not to display properly on search engine results pages (SERPs). However long they are, ensure they include all relevant information about what users will find when they click through; this way, they’ll know whether or not they’re interested before even landing on the site itself!
Keyword usage in the meta description
The meta description is a snippet of text that appears in Google search results when a user searches for your brand, product, or service. The purpose of this snippet is to entice users to click on your page and ultimately increase traffic.
The best way to optimize your meta descriptions is through research and testing. You can conduct keyword research to find out what terms people are searching for in relation to your business, then test different variations of those keywords in the meta descriptions that appear in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Meta descriptions should be brief but informative—no more than 160 characters or so—and must reflect the content on the page that they describe.
Optimize image Alt Text
Alt text is the text that a screen reader will read out loud when it can’t find an image. This makes it one of the fairly important components of onsite SEO. It’s a great way to add context, especially if you have multiple images on your page. For example, let’s say you have an image of a chair and an image of someone sitting in that chair:
The browser will read the first one as “A beach chair on a sandy beach,” while with the second one, they’ll hear “A person sits in their beach chair.” This can be helpful for visitors using assistive technologies like screen readers or magnifiers because they can get more information about what they’re looking at without having to zoom into an image or hover over it with their mouse cursor.
The content should be readable
Use a readable font. This may seem obvious, but choosing fonts that are easy on the eyes and not distracting is important. Make sure that your choice of font is appropriate for the tone of your website so that you don’t end up with something too formal or informal for its purpose.
Choose a readable color scheme
For example, avoid using black text on white backgrounds or vice versa because they’re difficult to read (unless used sparingly). If you want to use more saturated colors to stand out from competitors’ designs, consider using lighter shades instead to avoid distracting visitors from their reading experience by making them squint when they look at content on screen! Not everyone has perfect vision either; consider including high-contrast options such as bolding certain words within paragraphs so those with less than perfect vision can still see what they need without having trouble distinguishing between letters and symbols like dashes (-) from periods (.). Doing this simple step alone will make all difference between whether someone reads through all 500 pages before deciding whether or not this content’s worth visiting again later down the road -or even ever again!”
URL structure should be SEO-friendly
The first thing to remember is that the URL should be short, simple, and memorable. If you want your audience to visit your site repeatedly, it must be easy for them to remember. It’s also important that the URL is relevant to the content on the page, so people can understand what they will find when they click through. As well as this, a good rule of thumb is that every page has its unique landing page – meaning there are no duplicates or alternative versions of pages with different URLs across your website (unless you have set up redirects). If these rules aren’t followed, it could cause confusion for users and negatively impact their experience of visiting your site.
Improve page load speed
With the rise of mobile, page load speed has become a crucial ranking factor. Page speed measures how quickly your pages load on desktop and mobile devices. If you want to increase the number of people visiting your site, you need to ensure they can get there quickly, so they don’t bounce back or leave altogether. How fast do you think your website loads?
To improve page load speed, use these best practices:
- Keep images as small as possible without sacrificing quality; this will help reduce overall file size and therefore decrease loading times for all files on your site (not just images)
- Optimize CSS and JavaScript by using minified versions that aren’t dependent on external files (like jQuery), concatenation and compression tools like Gulp or Grunt
- Prioritize HTML above CSS and JavaScript in order to prevent render-blocking issues
Conclusion
These are the most crucial components of onsite SEO, but there’s more to it than just these six. I recommend reading more about optimizing your site for search engines and using tools like Google Search Console and Screaming Frog. Also, be sure to check out our other SEO articles!
