On-page SEO checklist

Let's talk about the types of SEO

 If we want our website to be found on the search engines and Google? or these search engines have crawled our website then what we want to do?

Are we want to basically, look at it from a two-pronged perspective, it's a two-prong strategy- 

The first strategy - we're going to talk about today is on-page SEO.

“The on-page SEO - is defined as what we do on our own  website to be relevant for search engine query on a search engine”.

The second strategy – we will talk about is off- page SEO

“The off-page SEO determines what we do our website to be relevant for search engine query and so off page SEO generally is synonymous with link building”.

Well, we’ll talk about that a little bit more as we go forward but really when you want to do SEO when you want to be found for a keyword on a search engine. You're going to apply but with on-page SEO and off page SEO.

So let's talk about what is On-page SEO?

 This is the first part of our SEO effort. We want to focus on On page SEO first-

"On-page, SEO is the method of optimizing elements of web pages remember these are all the items we want to do on our website to be relevant for certain search queries so it's basically the idea behind this is to make our web pages more relevant for specific search queries on search engines".

There are a number of different elements on our website on a particular web page that we want to manipulate or optimize. If you will be relevant for search engine query and so let's start around the idea that you know, let's start with the scheme first and so the scheme is nothing more than it's a collaborative effort between Bing, Yahoo, Google, and the idea is really they want to understand more about the content of your website and so the idea behind this is that you want to be able to provide snippets of information to these search engines. They understand a little bit more about what your web page is trying to convey so that they can find out exactly what's relevant to that search engine query. 

The more information they have the better of an opportunity you have to be ranked for that search engine query and  if you have a website with reviews and you provide snippets of information to the search engines the search engines, in turn, are going to present that information in the search engine results (SERPs). If you have positive reviews, in short, the whole idea behind the scheme is making sure you present information critical to your website so that the search engines better understand what your website all about.

There's also some other information here involved with schema and those are site links. So site links additional pages on your website, that shows up in the search engine result and again the more information a search engine has about you the better chance you have to be found the better chance you have to get it clicked. so site links are just additional links on your site that appear in search engine results  so by having more links in the search engine result you have a better chance of getting them click.

•  The Title Tag -

 The title tag is which shows up in the search engine results. If you've ever done a search engine query meaning you've gone to Google typed in a query using a keyword like Indian restaurants, you're going to see specific search engine results and the title tag is what appears in those search engine results.

“A title tag is important because it's the title of a web page that appears in those results. if we want to be found for the specific keyword we want to make sure that the keyword is in the title tag because that keywords going to describe what the page is all about”.

If we want to be found for that keyword let's just say Indian restaurants in Florida, for example, that's going to be part of our title tag, when somebody types in that particular keyword query Indian restaurants in Florida then we have a good chance of showing up because the title tag which is the title of the page is going to have that particular query in it. You can edit the title tag and when you edit the title tag you want to be able to put that particular keyword in the title tag so if we do a search on Google.

But certain search engines particularly Google has character limits around the number of characters you can use in the title tag and so we want to keep that in mind. If you actually have two keywords then you can use the primary keyword first then the secondary keyword and then the brand name so to me, this is the most optimal format, but keep in mind there is the character limits it makes your title tag more relevant you don't have to worry about necessarily fitting in excess keywords in the title tag because of again the title tag is character limits. the title tag is generally between 60 and 65 characters long and so if you go over those limits let's just say your title tag is more than 65 characters Google in this the case is going to cut off big characters and also makes it relevant for the keyword query so you want to keep “title tag probably no more than 60 characters because you'd flirt with putting more than 60 characters then the search engines are going to cut off that title tag and then that's not going to look good”

• Meta Description

“The Meta Description is just a short description of the content on your web page”. If the title tag is the title of the webpage the Meta Description describes the page".

It's a description of what that page is. The meta description appears under the title tag and then the URL, so if we go back to our Google search results we look here Indian restaurants we could see the URL which is underneath the title tag and then we could see the Meta Description. But the Meta Description just like the table tag is just as important because-

1.       It shows up in the search engine results

2.       It describes what the page is all about

3.       It allows you to optimize the Meta Description

 The optimal length for a Meta Description you can go up to 300 characters but I would not even recommend even flirting with that limit because just like the title tag search engines in the case of Google will actually cut off the Meta Description.

If you go over those limits you'll see that the search engines will cut off the copy of the Meta Description width and they'll just put ellipses, we don't necessarily want to go over those limits so my recommendation is to keep that Meta Description probably a hundred and sixty-five characters two to no more than 200 because we're trying to describe not only what the page is all about but we're also trying to optimize that Meta Description. The whole idea behind the Meta Description more than anything else describes what the page is all about but you want it to stand out uniquely.

• Header tags

Header tags are used on a web page to really separate out content and ideally, you want to be able to optimize the header tag and sub-header and there’s a hierarchy for headers, There's between a header one and a header six. We'll call it an h1 to h6.

 H1 is really at the top of the hierarchy for headers and  if we use that h1 on our webpage then what we're trying to explain that the search engines are listening to this particular keyword phrase in our header, how really the search engines interpret headers they see an h1 h2 h3 h4 h5 and h6. they know that if you're using an h1, if you put that keyword in the header tag what you're telling the search engines is hey I'm really emphasizing this particular keyword and so the search engine will interpret that as important and if you use your keyword in that header then really what you're saying is hey I really this keyword is really relevant to that query. 

Naturally the other benefit of a header is it really breaks up the page as well so the header you can use sub headers and subpatterns are nothing more than say a lower H tag so if you have a header that's an h1 you can use an h2 and h3 as a subheader and so forth and soon because what you're really trying to do is not only organize the content in your webpage but you're trying to emphasize that for google so if something's an h2 or an h6 you're basically telling Google or the other search engines this is not as important to say headers help not only organize the content but they help emphasize the actual keyword it is you want Google to recognize. headers are very important elements for on-page SEO.

• URL structure

 “URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator and  our URL is the specific location of a webpage on the Internet”.

so basically if we're found in the search engine results in one of our web pages are gonna go along with the title tag in the Meta Description in the search engine results in the URL that shows up along with the title tag in the Meta Description if we click on that link that's exactly where we're gonna go so URL structure is important for on-page SEO.

 Why is it important because not only does it show people where they're going but we have an opportunity to optimize that URL for the search engines to make our URL more relevant for that search query so just like the title tag just like the Meta Description just like the headers we can also manipulate the URL. if we look at a URL it consists of really the protocol and the protocol means it's either a secure site or non-secure site so if we see it's HTTPS that means it's a secure site and so ideally search engines like web pages or web sites that are secure so after the protocol, you're gonna see the domain and then after the domain, you're gonna see subdirectories okay so that's generally the breakout with a URL structure so you have the protocol the domain and subdirectories  

Like everything else since in SEO there are parameters just like “the title tag has parameters up to 65 characters the Meta Description tag has a limit of up to 165 characters a well-structured URL also has character counts but the idea here is we don't want to get into numbers when we talk about character counts for URL structure really the rule of thumb or the best practice for your URL is to keep it short and understandable”.

• Image alt text or alt tags 

 Alt tags or text tags as they're also known to allow the search engines to understand a little bit more about what's on the page in terms of image, images are a prominent part of every webpage on the Internet, unfortunately, images are usually files that are not readable by search engines so we want to be able to provide some alternate text so that the search engines understand what those images are all about, again it gives us an opportunity to communicate with the search engines. "There are character limits to alt tags you know generally the rule of thumb is 125 characters for an alt tag and the alt tag is used in the HTML".

• Internal links  

When it comes to SEO internal links also play a vital role because basically “an internal link which is a link from one page of your website to another page of your website allows Google too or other search engines really to follow the pages as they index your entire website”.

It serves that purpose of allowing search engines to index, it definitely improves the indexing but internal linking also has many benefits and one of the other benefits is it helps spreads what we call link juice which is basically a way another way of saying you know this page is important because it has links from other pages on our website. If we link me have a link from one page to another and a couple of other pages on our site linked to that same page then search engines tend to take notice and they tend to note that you know if one particular page has a number of different links pointing to it then this page may be important and so that's what we mean by link juice it's a signal for the search engines to determine what pages on your website is important

Sitemaps do the same thing except sitemaps are an entire list of links on your website and it allows the site search engines to find all your pages and you would say fairly easily but it also helps the end user by doing that by submitting our sitemap XML file to Google it speeds up the process because Google's able to now understand all the pages on our website that have been submitted and then once we submit those pages then Google is going to quickly index a majority of those pages if not all of those pages and so that's the benefit of having an XML sitemap for the search engines are that we can quickly submit that file to the search engine so our pages get submitted and indexed quicker, 

we could take that XML file and submit it to Google search console and so that expedites the process of indexing your site and helps your site not only get indexed faster but will help Google understand how many pages are on your site 

•  PageSpeed 

Page Speed identifying how quick our pages load in Google Analytics if your pages don't load very quickly than Google actually provides suggestions to speed up the page load time of a particular page and some of the culprits that you want to look at are making sure you have images that are good quality but also not a lot in size you want to make sure they're optimized you want to look at your server response time you want to make sure you optimize the code so there's a lot of different factors of page load time you just want to keep an eye on what pages are not loading quick enough and remember we want to keep it as low as possible but no more than 3 to 4 seconds 

All these are factors with on-page SEO that you want to address before you move on to off page SEO. We will turn our attention to off page SEO in the next article below.