To determine the ranking of your website, Google’s algorithm uses what’s called on-site factors and off-site factors. The on-site factors also known as on-page factors have to do with the elements of your website and include things like the quality of your code, the user-friendliness of your site, and your site’s content which includes both the text and visuals.
On-site SEO pertains to all the parts of search engine optimisation under your control. As the owner of your website, you’re in control of the quality of your content and the technical issues of your site. When you focus on on-siteSEO and create an awesome site with amazing content, it will start ranking well.
There are a few on-site factors that affect your search engine rankings and they are:
Content is indeed king online but it’s quality content that really counts. Your site has to consist of well-written, unique, informative and relevant content that pleases both people and search engines.
From an SEO perspective, there’s little difference between the best and worst content on the web if it’s not linkable. If other websites won’t link to your content, the search engines most likely won’t rank it well wherein your traffic numbers will suffer.
Once you’ve created lots of high-quality content, you should interlink it. Google analyses internal links on your site to discern the relationships between the various pages in its quest to determine your content’s importance.
The homepage of your site holds the greatest link value in the eyes of Google’s algorithm, Why? Because your homepage has or should have the most internal links. Your home page should be a high-level preview of the other content that’s located elsewhere on your site.
Your awesome content isn’t very valuable if your visitors never see it. That’s exactly what will happen if your page loads too slowly. A slow-loading page prompts most people to hit the back button and find what they need elsewhere. Google knows this and uses page speed as a ranking factor.
You can check a page’s load speed using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. Simply enter the page url for a quick evaluation. If your page loads slowly, you’ll be given some tips for speeding it up.
As important elements of your on-site SEO effectiveness, your core meta tags including your title tags, heading tags, and meta descriptions have to be spot-on. The title tag is the most important meta tag on your page. This meta tag should be unique from your other titles and adequately describe your page’s content.
The heading tags (H1, H2, H3, etc) help Google know what your page is all about. The H1 tag is the title of your content as it appears on the page. The H2 and H3 tags are paragraph titles or other content headers.
The meta description is what appears in search results. This is where you describe the content on your page in 160 or fewer characters. The meta description should include some keywords and entice people to click to learn more.