OnPage-Optimisation is one of the two pillars of search engine optimisation and refers to everything you can do on-site (on the website) that could potentially affect your search visibility. It is by far the widest topic an SEO will have to deal with.
OnPage-Optimisation deals with all internal adjustments on your website. It describes optimisation strategies that can be carried out by yourself and which can not be influenced from the outside or by third parties. You will usually first work on the OnPage-Optimisation of a website before you proceed to the OffPage-Optimisation.
The optimisation methods in OnPage-Optimisation are content, structural and technology-related. When it comes to the contextual and structural OnPage-Optimisation, you need to create high-quality and user-centric 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 specific meta-elements (for example the meta description), the alt-attributes of pictures, as well as the page titles (Title-element.)
Some content can also be marked with additional information specifically 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 better crawl and index your site. Content must also be internally linked to help the user, which can also help Google. A sensible forward-and reverse linking structure will help the user navigate deeper into topics that they want to know more about, as well as providing them with a paper trail, or breadcrumbs, with which they can return and learn more. If it helps the user navigate sensibly, it is likely to be helping Google too.
Other on-page SEO considerations are:
- Page speed. Google uses page speed as a ranking factor so you need to measure it, and improve it if needed.
- Fast pages are often mobile friendly, but there are other mobile-first 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, whether the page is missing or of the page has moved to another location. The web server may 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 make a duplicate of your website – by creating a www and non-www version, or http and https version, you may end up confusing Google.
- Pagination, that is, putting long content over multiple pages, often comes up as a question. Read the latest pagination guidelines.
Advanced on-page SEO topics.
Moving content between domains or directories is a task that comes with risks. Planning is very important but the rules are well defined. A site relaunch has similar risks and must be planned carefully. In general, moving content, changing structure and changing domain names are all tasks that should be done individually.
Google organic search results contain more than just organic links. As an SEO, one must consider the advantages of image SEO, video SEO, Google News and featured snippets.
Working with websites that span languages presents a new set of considerations. The hreflang tag for international content can be used to help Google understand which content belongs to which country.
