OnPage Optimisation deals with all internal adjustments to your website. It describes optimisation strategies that you can carry out yourself and that cannot be influenced from the outside or by third parties. You will usually first work on the OnPage Optimisation of a website before you move on to the OffPage Optimisation.
The optimisation methods in OnPage Optimisation are geared towards content, structure and technology. With content-related and structural OnPage Optimisation, the aim is to create high-quality and user-oriented content and then ensure that this content’s structure, such as the formatting and headlines, are well optimised.
On the technical side, OnPage Optimisation deals with optimising the source code of your website – the HTML. This includes the optimisation of certain meta elements (for example the meta description), the alt attributes of images, as well as the page title (title element.)
Some content can also be provided with additional information specifically intended for search engines via valid markup, or structured data.
Another part of onpage SEO is the optimisation of the internal link structure to ensure that the Google-Bot can crawl and index your website better. Content must also be internally linked to help users, which can also help Google. A sensible forward-and reverse link structure helps users dive deeper into the topics they want to know more about and provides them with a trail of breadcrumbs, with which they can return and learn more. If it helps users, it is likely to help Google too.
Other onpage SEO considerations are:
- Page speed. Google uses page speed as a ranking factor, so you should measure it and improve it if necessary.
- Fast pages are often mobile-friendly, but there are other mobile-friendliness considerations. Take a look at the Mobile-Friendly test tool, for example.
- The web server can be configured to send status codes for each page. These tell browsers and crawlers the current status of a page, for example whether the page is missing or has been moved to another location. The web server can also send temporary status codes if it is overloaded or if there are other technical issues.
- SEOs need to be aware of duplicate content. If you accidentally create a duplicate of your website – by creating a www and non-www version, or an http and https version – you may end up confusing Google.
- Pagination, i.e., distributing long content over multiple pages, often raises questions.
Advanced Onpage SEO Topics
Moving content between domains or directories is a task that comes with risks. Planning is very important, but the rules are clearly defined. A website relaunch has similar risks and must be planned carefully. In general, moving content, changing the structure and changing domain names are all tasks that should be done individually.
Google’s organic search results contain more than just organic links. As an SEO, you have to consider the advantages of image SEO, video SEO, Google News and Featured Snippets.
Working with websites that span multiple languages presents a new set of considerations. The hreflang tag for international content can help Google understand which content belongs to which country.
