There are many strategies involved with Search Engine Optimization and they can be placed into two main categories, those being off-page SEO and on-page SEO. You have little control of the off-page SEO, but you can do the work to improve your on-page SEO. So why is on-site optimization really that important?

On-Page SEO

This is the process where a website owner will optimize their web pages which helps them to get that important organic traffic and improve with rankings in the search engine result pages (SERPs). This means optimizing the page’s meta data which includes meta description, keyword density and meta title. It also involves optimizing the HTML and internal links on your page. The sum of all these items helps to improve your webpage and its presence on the internet through on-page SEO.

Off-page SEO includes social media content, any type of brand mention and backlinks from other websites. These all have an affect on the ranking of a website in the SERPs, while on-page SEO deals with content contained on a webpage which can influence the SEO such as JavaScript, HTML code, CSS, multi-media content, text and meta data. Since on-page SEO is where the search engines are focused, it should be the area where you concentrate your main SEO marketing strategy.

You want your website and the content that it contains to be seen by your users, including the images and the content. The parts that are visible to the search engines should be carefully optimized so that the search engines understand how to rank your site. Your on-page SEO is how search engines analyze your website and the content that it contains so that they can determine if searches that are being made relate to your site and if its content is relevant to those searches. Your website should constantly develop to meet the algorithm of Google.

Return on Investment

It does not matter if your business is big or small, you need to ensure that your website’s SEO is optimized. SEO is a common digital marketing strategy that is very popular because it has a reliable return on investment. On-page SEO offers the most reliable ROI of any digital marketing strategy and is comparable with a lower cost and long-term benefits to help a website grow which in turn brings in passive traffic for years to come.

Approximately half of the traffic to your website comes from the search engines Bing or Google which means that about 40% of your online revenue will come from the traffic you receive from the search engines. The first result in Google will receive around 30% of the keyword traffic and the first page search results get around 90% of the search traffic.

This is the key to the importance of on-page SEO. If your site does not have it, you will miss out on so many opportunities for your site to rank for the specific queries that relate to your business. If you do not have an SEO strategy your site will be lower in the search results than your competitors and therefore plenty of companies hire SEO specialists to help them optimize their site.

The Most Important SEO Elements

In addition to the on-page SEO strategies mentioned above, there are more crucial elements that are important for a site’s success. The key to maintaining a strategy for on-page SEO is to optimize a strategy which involves internal linking, meta data and content writing.

Site Structure and Internal Linking

The structure to your website is crucial so that the search engines can crawl it. You need to have anchor links, navigation bars and footers that are simple to use and allow the search engines to link users with queries that are relevant to your page. If your website structure is difficult to navigate then the search engines will have a difficult time identifying the pages on your web site. The Webmaster Guidelines contained on Google’s site put clear emphasis on the fact that your site needs a clear and conceptual hierarchy for your site’s pages with important links set out to be easily crawled by Google’s indexing bots.

Your Site’s Meta Data

Meta data is contained in the HTML code of every page on your website, and this includes the meta description and title tag which is what the search engines use to list your pages in the SERPs. When a search is conducted in a search engine, the results should return a meta title and meta description in the link that appears for the webpage. When you optimize this meta data and use important keywords with concise and detailed content, it helps both the users and the search engines to understand what your web page is all about.

Content Writing

The content that is on your site needs to be good quality. This means it does not contain a massive amount of your keywords (also known as “keyword stuffing” because this will have the oppositive effect and have your web page penalized. The content you write should offer value to your readers and answer their queries. Create a site that offers useful information and write content that is clear and accurate. What words would you type in the search bar to find the content on your page? This is the type of content that you should write about, and you should include those words in the content on your site.

It is up to you to help Google to understand the content on your site so you need to ensure that the Google spiders can crawl all your important content. Script files can hinder that exploration, so take it easy with CSS and JavaScript files. Create pages that are for your site users, not for the search engines and never use deceptive practices to get visitors to your website.

The process of on-site optimization is an important one. You need to get it right the first time, because Google can be very unforgiving. If you are confused about the process or need help with an on-site optimization strategy, it is a worthwhile investment to enlist the help of an expert.