On-page SEO is about building a website that appeals to users with the practice of optimizing elements on your website, like page speed and keyword density, versus factors off your website, like external backlinks, to improve a site’s ranking and visibility in search engines.

Why do On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO leads to higher search rankings, increased traffic to your site, and more conversions. The results of on-page SEO – Search Engine Optimization take time, but once your on-page SEO strategy gets off the ground, it can make your online rankings and sales soar.

On-Page SEO vs. Off-Page SEO: What’s the difference?

On-page SEO differs from off-page SEO, another term you’ll likely encounter when trying to boost your online rankings.

What’s the difference between on-page and off-page SEO?

• On-page SEO: Refers to actions taken on your website, like optimizing your content and streamlining your navigation, to boost your search rankings.

• Off-page SEO: Refers to actions taken off your website, like earning backlinks from other reputable sites, to boost your search rankings.

What on-page SEO ranking factors should I optimize?

With on-page SEO, you have several different on-page ranking factors. You want to optimize all these factors. Taking the time to optimize each of these factors will improve your rankings in search results and make your website more competitive and difficult to beat.

Factors that can impact on-page SEO include:

Core Web Vitals: It’s a set of real-world metrics that quantify a website’s user experience. They measure important dimensions such as visual stability, interactivity and load time. Improving your website’s Core Web Vitals tells Google your site has a positive user experience.

‍Page speed: Page speed (also known as load time) is an important part of on-page SEO – Google tends to rank faster pages higher than slower ones, and optimizing page speed can also help get more of your pages into Google’s search index. There are lots of ways to improve a page’s speed but images, JavaScript files, caching and compression are good places to start.

‍Mobile friendliness: It is a measure of how well a site performs when someone tries to visit and use the site with a mobile device. Mobile friendly pages are able to shrink down to fit on any device’s screen while still allowing people to navigate around the page to achieve their goals. They also prioritize the mobile user experience through responsive design, simple and easy navigation and fast page speeds.

Title tags: Title tags, also called “page titles”, are HTML tags that (as you probably guessed) define the title of the page and describe what the content on the page will be about. For example, the title of this article is “On-Page vs. Off-Page SEO: What’s the Difference?” so the title tag for the page is <title>On-Page vs. Off-Page SEO: What’s the Difference?</title>. When looking for content that’s relevant to a user’s query, Google relies on the keywords in title tags (among other things) to decide whether or not a page is topically related.

Meta descriptions: Meta descriptions are, like title tags, HTML tags that help describe what the page is about. While Google does use descriptions when deciding if a page is relevant to a query, their main SEO function is to encourage people to click through to your site from search results.

Content quality: When it comes to on-page SEO, content is king. Search engines have a lot of different ways to evaluate content quality, but it really comes down to answering A) Is it useful for the user? B) Is it easy to read? C) Is it unique? and D)Is it relevant to a user’s query? If you can honestly answer “yes” to each of those four questions, your content is in a good place. 

HTML headers: HTML headers are HTML tags that specify headlines and subheads within a webpage’s content. They help your website’s visitors better read and understand your content. For on-page SEO, these tags help search engines better understand what the content on a page is about and how it relates to a person’s search query.

Image alt text: Image “alt text” refers to an attribute within an image’s HTML tag that contains a text description of the image. Alt text is used by assistive technologies such as screen readers as well as browsers as a backup when an image fails to load on a page. Search engines look at alt text as a way to decide how relevant an image is to someone’s query. As such, alt text is a very important on-page SEO factor for image searches as well as traditional web search.

‍Internal linking: Linking to other pages on your site from within your own content is useful as it helps visitors find related content with extra background or context. We do it several times in this article, linking to more in-depth guides to explain important details regarding on and off-page SEO. Internal linking also improves your site’s SEO by helping search engines find new content. Plus, the anchor text you use for your internal links tells search engines what they should expect from the destination page and how it relates to the linking content.

‍Navigation: In the context of on-page SEO, “navigation” is about making sure all users can access and consume the content on a web page. We’re not talking about how your pages are grouped or linked together (that’s called “site structure”). Google cares a lot about what sort of page it’s recommending to searchers and they want anything they recommend to be accessible to everyone, regardless of disability or browser.

How to evaluate your on-page optimization

Now that you know about on-page SEO, you can evaluate your site’s performance. You can either use a tool to audit your site or you can look at separate pages manually, depending on your preference. If you choose to look manually, you can use these criteria as a basis for on-page optimization.

• Are you using keywords for every page? Have these keywords been delivering visitors? If they haven’t been, why are you still using the keywords?

• Are you linking pages on your site to each other? Could this be a way to help visitors get from one point to another with only a click or two?

• Does your site load quickly? Or do some pages take a long time to load? If you’re having problems, find out where the issue lies. A slow-loading website is something neither human nor bot visitors enjoy!

• Does your site have fresh content? Has it been more than one or two years? Has anything changed or is it all still relevant?

“Remember: SEO is not a one-and-done deal. It’s something you should continually improve upon. You should treat this On-Page SEO Template as a living, breathing document that will help guide your SEO strategy for months (or years) to come.”

Pro tip: Read our Off- Page SEO Optimization to know how it covers anything you can optimize outside of your site (or externally) in an attempt to boost your rankings.

One factor that plays a crucial role in providing users with a great experience is page speed. With a free and easy-to-use tool like Google PageSpeed Insights, you can find out your page speed instantly, plus get actionable advice for improving your Google page speed.

If you’re ready to learn more, keep reading, because this article covers:

• What is Google Page Speed Insight ?

• Why does page speed matter?

• What can you do to improve page speed?

• How does website hosting affect page speed?

• How often should you use Google PagesPeed Insights?

• Takeaways.

What is Google Page Speed Insight?

Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool to help you find and fix issues slowing down your web application. An open-source tool called Lighthouse collects and analyzes lab data that’s combined with real-world data from the Chrome User Experience Report dataset. 

Page Speed

Page speed is the amount of time it takes between the browser’s request for a page until the browser completes processing and rendering the content. Many factors affect the speed of a given page including quantity and type of content, distance the data travels, connection type, device, operating system, and browser.

Why does page speed matter?

You may have already heard that page speed is important, but why does it really matter? There are numerous reasons that page speed is important to your business.

1.Users hate slow-loading pages

With the growth of the Internet, there is a high expectation for pages to load quickly. Users expect your page to load within a second because they want their information as fast as possible.

This means that businesses with slow-loading-pages lose out on leads because users don’t want to wait for those pages to load. If your website doesn’t load as quickly as the others, your leads will find alternative sites with pages that take less time to appear on their screens.

Page speed is especially important for your mobile visitors. Many users conduct mobile searches because they want answers quickly. You need to ensure that your page loads quickly, so these users stay on your site and learn more about your business.

2.Users spend less time on your page if it’s slow

If your page doesn’t load quickly, users will spend less time on your site. Even if they wait for your page to load initially, they won’t wait for additional pages to load because they might not have time to wait for each page.

You will lose leads because your pages take too long to provide them with information. If many leads leave your page because it loads too slowly, you will significantly increase how quickly leads come to your page and leave, otherwise known as your bounce rate.

This will impact your site’s ranking and make it harder for you to reach more audiences. To keep leads engaged and interested in your page, make sure your pages load quickly on your website.

3.It impacts your conversion rate

Your page’s speed impacts your conversion rate. Since the goal of your business is to earn conversions, you won’t profit from a slow-loading page because leads won’t stick around to convert.

On the contrary, a fast-loading page has a great impact on conversions. Users will convert because the page is loading quickly and guiding them through each step. They won’t have to wait around for the page to load to make a purchase.

Your business could lose potential profit simply by having a page that loads seconds slower than the competition. Page speed affects your business’ conversion rate and profits, so it’s important that you invest in helping you site run faster to avoid losing out on a profit.

4.It impacts your SEO ranking

If you’re using search engine optimization (SEO), page speed is a crucial element. Google recognizes that page speed is an important element for users and has started to move towards making page speed a top-ranking factor for SEO users.

If your site loads too slowly, Google won’t rank your page higher to reach more leads. When your pages load quickly, however, you improve your SEO ranking.

Factoring in your website’s page loading time will impact your search engine ranking and overall lead generation. By improving your page speed, you will drive in more valuable leads for your business.

5.It affects your quality score

Are you running a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign? If so, your page speed will affect your ad’s quality score.

When you create a PPC campaign, your maximum bid and quality score determine your ads placement. If your quality score decreases, this will lower your ad’s position and potentially increase your costs per click (CPC).

It is important to note that page speed affects multiple extensions of your website. Focus on getting your page running quickly to ensure that all other campaigns run smoothly.

6.It’s the first impression users get of your business

When users come across your site for the first time, you want to give them a positive impression of your business. Creating fast-loading pages will build confidence with your audience and ensure them that your business is reliable.

Alternatively, a slow-loading page might trigger the opposite feeling. Leads will immediately back out of your page to find a company that promotes efficiency and professionalism.

If you want users to view your business as professional, you need to make sure your page is running quickly. This will create a positive impact on your audience and will keep them coming back to your website.

So, now that you know why page speed is crucial for your site, the next step is knowing how to fix it.

What can you do to improve page speed?

You may speed up the time it takes for a page to load on your website in a variety of ways. Here are a few examples:

• Avoid landing page redirection because each one starts the HTTP request-response cycle and slows down the rendering of the page.

• Allow your scripts and CSS to load in external files rather than preventing all web pages from loading.

• Gzip compression should be enabled and tested on your web server.

• Optimize your images and give your content first priority.

• Regularly purge your cache.

How does website hosting affect page speed?

Choosing the correct host for your website is critical for a quality user experience. You’ll need to consider your options based on the type of content and the expected traffic.

• Shared web hosting: Shared web hosting means your site shares a physical server with other websites. Activity on the other sites sharing the server may use up bandwidth and server resources slowing down the delivery of your content.

• Cloud hosting: This option is like virtual private servers; except with cloud hosting, your site may exist over several different servers making the site more reliable, and traffic spikes have less impact on performance.

• Dedicated hosting: Dedicated hosting gives you full control over the site infrastructure. Since only your site uses the server, you don’t have to worry about drains on resources due to server competition from other websites.

• Virtual private servers: With virtual private servers, your website gets its own virtual server. Your site may reside on the same machines as other sites, but they do not share an operating system making the site faster and more scalable.

If you see performance problems on your site, you may want to speak with your provider. In some cases, you may need to move your site to a different provider with a better service level agreement or upgrade your hosting plan.

How often should you use Google PagesPeed Insights?

Even if your page is performing well, you should conduct systematic tests because performance best practices are frequently revised and Google is constantly looking for ways to make PageSpeed Insights better.

Takeaways

• Page speed is the amount of time it takes to request a page and have the page completely loaded in the browser.

• Page speed affects the way users feel about a brand and its products and services.

• Slow page speeds increase bounce rates.

• Page speed is important to SEO.

• Google makes some final ranking determinations based on page speed.

• Users expect the same performance on both mobile and desktop.

• Google makes some final ranking determinations based on page speed.

• You can’t make good decisions about content and infrastructure if you don’t have baseline metrics and performance trends when making those decisions.

• Your website hosting service and type may affect page speed.

• Page speed can change quickly based on multiple factors. Synthetic website performance monitoring can capture performance lags you may not notice otherwise.

• You can improve page speed quickly with some simple optimizations, such as controlling image file sizes and removing dead code.

As soon as you have opened this blog, we have just 15 seconds to grab your attention. Yes, yes, 15 seconds is the average time a user spends on a website. If it doesn’t provide expected content or goes clunky, business owners must be ready to say goodbye to their potential customers.

8 Key Strategies for Optimizing Your Media Assets

• Consider using a content management system (CMS): Certain CMS platforms, like WordPress, have plugins and other tools that are used to improve your media’s performance. These resources can help automate the optimization process and streamline media file management.

• Lazy load your media: A method known as lazy loading involves only loading the media that can be seen on the screen right now. The quantity of data that needs to be loaded can be decreased and loading times can be improved as a result.

• Compress your images: It’s crucial to compress your image files because they can increase the time it takes for your website to load. You may compress your images with the help of a number of programs without sacrificing quality. Kraken, ImageOptim, and TinyPNG are a few well-liked choices.

• Use the right file format: For various sorts of photos, different file formats are more appropriate. For instance, PNG is better for drawings with transparent backgrounds whereas JPEG is better for pictures. Reducing the file size and speeding up the download can be accomplished by using the proper file format.

• Use a content delivery network (CDN): Distributing your media assets from servers that are physically closer to your users, a CDN can help to increase the performance of your website. User experience can be enhanced, and loading times decreased as a result.

• Use responsive images: Images that are optimized for various screen sizes are called responsive images. This can help to enhance mobile performance and guarantee that your website looks good across all platforms.

• Enhance your video files for performance: If your website includes videos, it’s crucial to do so. This may entail using the appropriate video format and compressing the files as well as lowering their resolution.

• Minimize the number of media files: The performance of your website may suffer if it has an excessive number of media files. Try to employ as few media files as possible; only include those that are absolutely necessary.

Conclusion

There are different website performance optimization that can be implemented to further improve the delivery and speed of your content. For your website is constantly perform at its best, it’s crucial to regularly review and adjust your media optimization tactics.

What is SEO and how exactly does it help you to achieve your goals?

Many people know that SEO is important for the success of their business but don’t know what it actually is. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a process that improves the visibility of a website on search engines and social media platforms. For example, if you want more people to visit your blog, then your blog needs to be optimized for search engines so that it ranks higher in the search engine results pages (SERPS) and increases in traffic.

The goal of any website should always be to get more traffic. You can only get this by investing in your site’s SEO. This article will teach you how to start optimizing your site for success.

What Does “SEO” Stand For?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

SEO means the process of improving your website to increase its visibility in Google, Microsoft Bing, and other search engines whenever people search for:

• Products you sell.
• Services you provide.
• Information on topics in which you have deep expertise and/or experience.

The better visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to be found and clicked on. Ultimately, the goal of search engine optimization is to help attract website visitors who will become customers, clients or an audience that keeps coming back.

Benefits & importance of SEO

People are searching for any manner of things both loosely and directly related to your business. These are all opportunities to connect with these people, answer their questions, solve their problems, and become a trusted resource for them.

• More website traffic: When your site is optimized for search engines, it gets more traffic which equates to increased brand awareness.
• More customers: To get your site optimized, it has to target keywords. The terms your ideal customers/visitors are searching—meaning you’ll get more relevant traffic.
• Better reputation: Ranking higher on Google builds instant credibility for your business. If Google trusts you, then people trust you.
• Higher ROI: You put money into your website, and into the marketing campaigns that lead back to your website pages. A top-performing site improves the fruits of those campaigns, making your investment worth it.
• Important for social promotion of a website: if a website appears in top results of a search engine such as Google, Bing, etc. then it gains instant popularity and to some extent trust of a user.
• It plays an important role in improving the business of a commercial site: if two websites are selling the same product, for example, both Myntra and Koovs focus on selling fashion clothing, then the site having a better position in the search result of a search engine has chances of getting more users as compared to the other.
• Improving user experience: SEO doesn’t focus only on improving search results but also on improving the user experience and usability of a website so that a website is more appealing to a user.

Types of SEO

Google and other search engines take several factors into account when ranking content, and as such SEO has many facets. The core three types of SEO are on-page, off-page, and technical SEO:

• On-page SEO: Optimizing the quality and structure of the content on a page. Content quality, keywords, and HTML tags are the key players for on-page SEO.
• Off-page SEO: Getting other sites, and other pages on your site to link to the page you are trying to optimize. Backlinks, internal linking, and reputation are your off-page MVPs.
• Technical SEO: Improving your site’s overall performance on search engines. Site security, UX, and structure are key here.

You maintain 100% control over on page SEO and technical SEO. That’s not always true with off-site (you can’t control links from other sites or if platforms you rely on end up shutting down or making a major change), but those activities are still a key part of this SEO trinity of success. 

Imagine SEO as a sports team. You need both a strong offense and defense to win – and you need fans (a.k.a., an audience). Think of technical optimization as your defense, content optimization as your offense, and off-site optimization as ways to attract, engage and retain a loyal fanbase.

On-page SEO

In SEO, your content needs to be optimized for two primary audiences: people and search engines. What this means is that you optimize the content your audience will see (what’s actually on the page) as well as what search engines will see (the code).

The goal, always, is to publish helpful, high-quality content. You can do this through a combination of understanding your audience’s wants and needs, data and guidance provided by Google.

When optimizing content for people, you should make sure it:

• Covers relevant topics with which you have experience or expertise.
• Includes keywords people would use to find the content.
• Is unique or original.
• Is well-written and free of grammatical and spelling errors.
• Is up to date, containing accurate information.
• Includes multimedia (e.g., images, videos).
• Is better than your SERP competitors.
• Is readable – structured to make it easy for people to understand the information you’re sharing (think: subheadings, paragraph length, use bolding/italics, ordered/unordered lists, reading level, etc.).

For search engines, some key content elements to optimize for are:

• Title tags
• Meta description
• Header tags (H1-H6)
• Image alt text
• Open graph and Twitter Cards metadata

Off-page SEO

There are several activities that may not be “SEO” in the strictest sense, but nonetheless can align with and help contribute indirectly to SEO success.

Link building (the process of acquiring links to a website) is the activity most associated with off-site SEO. There can be great benefits (e.g., rankings, traffic) from getting a diverse number of links pointing at your website from relevant, authoritative, trusted websites. Link quality beats link quantity – and a large quantity of quality links is the goal.

And how do you get those links? There are a variety of website promotion methods that synergize with SEO efforts. These include:

• Brand building and brand marketing: Techniques designed to boost recognition and reputation.
• PR: Public relations techniques designed to earn editorially-given links.
• Content marketing: Some popular forms include creating videos, ebooks, research studies, podcasts (or being a guest on other podcasts) and guest posting (or guest blogging).
• Social media marketing and optimization: Claim your brand’s handle on any and all relevant platforms, optimize it fully and share relevant content. 
• Listing management: Claiming, verifying and optimizing the information on any platforms where information about your company or website may be listed and found by searchers (e.g., directories, review sites, wikis).
• Ratings and reviews: Getting them, monitoring them and responding to them.

Generally, when talking about off-site, you’re talking about activities that are not going to directly impact your ability to rank from a purely technical standpoint. 

However, again, everything your brand does matters. You want your brand to be found anywhere people may search for you. As such, some people have tried to rebrand “search engine optimization” to actually mean “search experience optimization” or “search everywhere optimization.”

Technical SEO

Optimizing the technical elements of a website is crucial and fundamental for SEO success. 

It all starts with architecture – creating a website that can be crawled and indexed by search engines. Google’s trends analyst, once put it in a Reddit AMA: “MAKE THAT DAMN SITE CRAWLABLE.” 

You want to make it easy for search engines to discover and access all of the content on your pages (i.e., text, images, videos). What technical elements matter here: URL structure, navigation, internal linking, and more.

Experience is also a critical element of technical optimization. Search engines stress the importance of pages that load quickly and provide a good user experience. Elements such as Core Web Vitals, mobile-friendliness and usability, HTTPS, and avoiding intrusive interstitials all matter in technical SEO. 

Another area of technical optimization is structured data (a.k.a., schema). Adding this code to your website can help search engines better understand your content and enhance your appearance in the search results. 

Plus, web hosting services, CMS (content management system) and site security all play a role in SEO. 

How does SEO work?

So how does Google determine which pages to surface in the search engine results page (SERP) for any given query? How does this translate into traffic to your website? Let’s take a look at how SEO works.

• Google’s search crawlers constantly scan the web, gathering, categorizing, and storing the billions of web pages out there in its index. When you search for something and Google pulls up results, it’s pulling from its index, not the web itself.
• Google uses a complex formula (called an algorithm) to order results based on a number of criteria (ranking factors—which we’ll get into next) including the quality of the content, its relevance to the search query, the website (domain) it belongs to, and more.
• How people interact with results then further indicates to Google the needs that each page is (or isn’t) satisfying, which also gets factored into the algorithm.

In other words, SEO works like a complex feedback system—to surface the most accurate, trustworthy, and relevant results for any given search using input from you, Google, and searchers. Your role is to produce content that satisfies Google’s expertise, authority, and trust requirements that satisfy its searchers’ requirements.

SEO is ongoing

SEO never ends. Search engines, user behavior and your competitors are always changing. Websites change and move (and break) over time. Content gets stale. Your processes should improve and become more efficient.

Bottom line: There’s always something you can be monitoring, testing or improving. Or, as Bruce Clay put it: SEO will only be done when Google stops changing things and all your competition dies.

Conclusion

A good understanding of search engine optimization can help your business rank higher on search engine results pages and drive more traffic to your website. Read on to find out the basics of SEO and how you can use it to your advantage.