On-page SEO
As the name suggests, On-Page refers to the optimization opportunities on a website. By optimizing various components of your website, search engines can find, index, and categorize your content easier. If done correctly, On-Page SEO will positively affect your user experience and ultimately ranking in the SERPs. The following is a basic list of On-Page considerations for beginners:
Page Architecture and Internal Linking
- Ensure that anchor texts are the same if they have the same link
- Try to avoid more than 100-200 internal links on your website
Indexing and Cache
- Make sure your robots.txt file and XML sitemap is in the root directory
- Think mobile first! Ensure that your website experience is optimized for mobile devices
Page Load Time
- Make sure that none of your pages takes more than 3 seconds to load. It has always been important for user experience and in July 2018, page speed will be an official Google ranking factor.
OnPage Check
- Create unique and expressive titles
- Declare all descriptions
- Ensure only one H1 tag per URL
- Add relevant ALT tags to images
Status Codes and Redirects
- Ensure that your website does not show 4xx or 5xx status codes
- Check to see if your website has 302 redirects if so it is advisable to use 301 redirects instead, as 301 redirects transfer the search engine value and ranking to the new page
Content
- Ensure your content is unique, especially above the fold
- Avoid duplicate content on different subdomains
International Scope
- Create an international version of your URL
- Implement a hreflang/rel
