When Google crawls your website, their spider-bots are looking for several core elements (or attributes) that help them understand the relevancy of your site based on the topics you want to rank for. These elements combined make up what’s often referred to as Onsite SEO.
While onsite SEO only makes up for approximately 30% of all Google ranking factors, without proper onsite SEO you are dramatically supressing your website’s ability to rank for your given niche or topic.
Google needs proper onsite SEO to guage how relevant your website is for a given topic as compared to all of the other sites that are out there trying to rank for the same things. Having a solid onsite SEO strategy makes it easier for Google to crawl and read your site, and the easier it is, the better off you’ll be.
Here are some standard onsite SEO elements that you need to be aware of:
Unique Page Content
Page content is the real meat and potatoes behind search result position. Content is what the user came to see when they clicked through to your site, and therefore it is extrememly important to search engines.
When you think about it, what would a search engine be without content to rank? Therefore, the name of the game with page content is two-fold. First, from a technical SEO perspective, your content needs to supply a demand and Second: it must be linkable.
Make your content unique, and full of value. Don’t be worried about giving away too much. You’re audience will reciprocate when you provide more than enough value by doing what you need them to do whether it’s picking up the phone to call you, placing an order or filling out a web form to contact you.
Title Tag
Many SEO experts agree that your page’s title tag is the second most important onsite ranking factor for SEO, right after content. In conjunction with Meta Descriptions, you most often see Title tags (or title elements) used in SERPs as the link you click on to visit the site.
For onsite SEO purposes, the title of a web page should be an accurate description of a given page’s content. This serves as a critical layer to both UX (user experience) and SEO (search engine optimization).
Meta Description
Meta descriptions provide an explanation of the content of the web pages on your site. You most commonly see them included in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) below the main link to the site.
While it’s true that they don’t carry much weight when it comes to the actual ranking of a website, they do play a powerful role in click-through from SERPs.
Descriptions are your opportunity as the webmaster to entice people to visit your website by demonstrating how relevant it is to what they’re looking for. Think of them as ad copy. It’s in your best interest to make your meta decscription as compelling as possible.
Page URL
Each website, to some degree has a categorical hierarchy. Whether you have an online store or have various aspects of yourself or your business that you’re trying to promote, it’s important that you segregate topics of your site into relevant categories so that Google can understand the flow of your site easier.
When it comes to proper page URL strategies, it’s important for you to have a category hierarchy in place because it helps Google guage the relevancy of a given page on your site.
Here is an example of proper hierarchal URL structure:
- http://www.yoursite.com/mens/dress-shirts
In this example you can see that the URL clearly shows that the ‘dress shirts’ page belongs to the mens category, therefore Google understands that the page on the site is relevant to men’s dress shirts. From this URL, search engines can also conclude that the page isn’t likely relevant to just shirts in general or even dresses that can double as shirts. It helps them understand that the context of this page is meant for a specific purpose.
Site Navigation
While your site’s navigation structure isn’t a highly critical element of onsite SEO, it does play a major role in user experience. Delivering poor user experience will encourage site users to likely do the opposite of what you’re trying to get them to do which is remain on your site and consume your content.
Make your website ridiculously simple to navigate and you’ll find that site visitors(so long as the content is great) will stick around for much longer and even return time after time to consume what you have to offer.
Anchor Text
Anchor Text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink on a page that helps search engines understand the subject matter of the linked-to page.
Site Speed (Page Speed or Load Speed)
Many people refer to site speed, page speed and load speed synonomously, however site speed is the page speed for a sample of page views on an entire website while page speed refers to the load time of the content on a single page of a site.
Google has recently revealed that site speed (and as a result, page speed) is one of many signals used by their ranking algorithms to rank websites. Google is obsessed with speed, and so are your website visitors.
Before you begin to panic about the time it takes to load content on your site, it’s important to understand that in depth research has indicated that Google could only be measuring the time to first byte load for how it considers page speed. That means that it’s not necessarily counting the time it takes to load a page in it’s entirety, though that’s how your site visitors will generally measure it.
Site Speed is a crucial factor for delivering an incredible user experience and shouldn’t be taken lightly. The faster you can get your site pages to load, the higher your chance will be to convert the visitors on your site into paying customers, or return visitors.
Schema.org Structured data
Schema.org (or Schema) refers to a specific vocabulary of meta tags (or microdata) that you can add to your HTML in an effort to enhance the way your site pages are shown in SERPs.
It originally came from a collaboration between Yandex, Yahoo!, Google and Bing in order to provide information to search engines that was needed to understand your content and provide the most relevant and best search results.
By including Schema to your site, you are able to enhance your SERPs by including rich snippets directly beneath the page title. This could be everything from star ratings to publication or release dates and much more.
At this point in time, there is no conclusive evidence that has indicated the bearing that Schema has on search rankings, but there are some indications that click-through rates are positively affected.