On-site or on-page SEO is a powerful tool that’s at your disposal. This type of SEO is all about tweaks you can do to your page or website in order to optimize it for Google and for your users.
The great news is that the changes are often easy to implement, and the results are often surprising (in a good way). Plus, you are in full control since you get to decide which target audience you want to reach or what the goal for that page should be.
Still, unless you know how SEO works, it can be difficult to know what to do. So if you don’t know where to start, here are a few easy-to-follow tips.
Do You Need Local SEO?
Before we dive into the more technical aspect of SEO, let’s first see if your business can benefit from local SEO.
In a nutshell, if you own a local business and want to attract bookings, orders, clinic visits, or in-store traffic, you need local SEO. This is a combination of on-page and off-page SEO, so you may want to hire a local specialized agency that knows the market to put your campaign together.
For instance, if you have a Florida business, you can benefit from hiring an experienced local SEO agency to help you drive relevant traffic. That’s because they know how Florida businesses operate and how the locals think better than anyone outside the state.
Titles, Headers, Meta (HTML Elements)
These are part of the collection of HTML elements your browsers use to create the visual structure of your website. But they are also SEO elements because Google’s bots (or the bots of any other search engine for that matter) use them to understand what your page/website is about.
For instance, the title (found in <title> HTML tags in the code of your page) tells visitors (humans or bots) what type of information and content they can find on that page. That’s why it helps to use the focus keywords of each page in the title.
The headers are also known as body tags (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>) and they help create structure. You should use them to highlight the important parts of your page and to bring other keywords to Google’s attention.
Lastly, the meta description is the short text you see under the title in search results. This one has the role of enticing users to click on the title and land on your page.
Image Alt-text
People are visual beings, and images, videos, GIFs, or infographics (also known as visual elements) are more attractive to the human eye in the context of online content. Specialists even found that social media posts that get the most shares include some type of impressive visual content.
Therefore, you can use visual elements (like product photography) to make your website attractive. Well, the imaginary alt-text (which most content management platforms let you introduce when uploading the element) is used to tell Google what your image is about.
This is important because Google also delivers image-based results, so there will be people who will find your website through an image search.
Good URL Structure
The URL is the link to your page (seen in the address bar), and each one should be simple and clear, conveying the core content of the page (such as www.mywebsite.com/sales). But, in order to make your site easily navigable, you also need an URL hierarchy, with one Home page that leads to several subpages that also link to other pages or blog posts.
This is called internal linking, and it shows Google and viewers which of your pages are related to other pages.
Wrap Up
On-site SEO is mostly about organizing your website or pages in a way that’s pleasing to the human eye and the Google bot. Overall, it’s about creating harmony and a positive user experience.