A Beginner's Guide To On-Page SEO - Part 1

In today's article, we'll talk you through the basics of on-page SEO. These are all "easy wins" that will help your search engine rankings.

On-page SEO is the practice of optimising your web pages so that they rank as highly as possible with the search engines.

Off-page SEO is, as the name suggests, everything that happens on other websites. This includes links back to your site, your social media profiles etc.

Here are the five things you need to consider

1. Page Title

The title of your page or article is important for a couple of reasons. First of all, it tells the reader what they are about to read.

The title also tells Google what keywords you are trying to optimise for. So, in the case of this article, Google knows we would like to rank as high as possible for "on-page SEO".

2. Headings

Headings are another way to tell readers, and search engines, what your article is about. This helps with SEO directly (we will get a slight boost for "Page Title", "Headings" etc).

It also makes the article easier to read (see more below). This has an indirect effect on your SEO. Google notices when people stay on your site longer and read more pages. It then rewards you with a little SEO boost.

3. Images

Images are an often forgotten part of SEO. Make sure your images all have what's called "Alt text" or "Alt tags" added to them.

The alt text is the description that appears on your screen whenever the image doesn't load properly. Don't use it to stuff keywords in. Instead, add an actual description of the image. You may find you get a ranking boost for this very search term!

4. Internal Links

Internal links (links to other articles and pages on the same website) help readers discover more about your business. A good internal link structure will ensure that visitors spend more time on your site.

This is rewarded by Google (indirect SEO). It also helps the Google crawlers themselves. Google can only find pages via links, so the correct site structure and hierarchy ensures that none of your pages get "orphaned".

5. External Links

Some people are reluctant to add external links (links to pages on other people's websites). They worry that they will end up losing traffic (and "link juice") to help someone else's business.

First of all, high-quality external links will BOOST your SEO, not harm it. Google rewards sites that are set up for readers, and it's very helpful to readers to have useful external links.

Examples of good external links are:

• The BBC
• Google
• Wikipedia

Second, if you are worried about people navigating away from your site, just set the link to open in a new tab (target="_blank" rel="noopener"). That way, your website stays alive in their browser even when they click on an external link.

We'll have five more tips in our next article. And if you'd like to learn more about how we help website owners optimise their content, please get in touch.