At first, and many times even subsequently, a lot of people have questions about what on-page SEO really is. In this article, I am going to be as simple as one can be, explaining on-page SEO. What it really is, and how it works.
SEO
Before we dive into on-page SEO, I’d love to remind you what SEO means. It is an abbreviation that reads: “Search engine optimization.”
It is a series of techniques used to make search engines recognize your site faster and better—more like optimizing your site for search engine recognition.
On-Page SEO
This is often known as on-site SEO, and I am going to attempt to explain it using an analogy.
Imagine looking through a children’s book, searching for a particular page you can’t remember. Keep in mind that this book is a pretty big book, so big it’ll take hours to look through. (I know children’s books are not so big; it is just an example.)
Now, you don’t remember the page. But you know what it looked like: you know there was a large painting of a dragon there, and you remember that there was some tinge of oil at the far left corner, which was folded a bit.
Do you think this picture of a dragon and the stain from oil is going to help you find your page faster? Of course, it will. You could have been flipping pages casually, but the moment you stop by a page with the painting of a dragon, you are going to pause, and you are going to say: “Wait, I remember this. This is the page I am looking for.”
“Search engines work the same way.”
Search engines represent you in the above story, and the several web pages on your website (A website contains several web pages) represent the picture of the dragon and the large oil drop on the book.
On-page SEO is optimizing individual web pages on your website so that search engines can find them easily and thus, display them at the top of the search engine results page.
For you to be able to do this, you will need to have some idea about what web pages are and what makes up a webpage. A webpage is to a website what a leaflet or a page is to a complete book.
A webpage has a number of elements. Of course, it should have a title. It should have tags. There is something called a meta tag, and it is a part of a webpage. Web pages will, of course, contain content: words, a lot of them, some pictures, videos, and sometimes even audios. Basically, they can contain anything.
On-page SEO is basically making sure the content that appears on your website is properly optimized so that search engines can find and read them. It is making sure that there are dragons and smudges.
On-page SEO is also making your page responsive and easy to navigate.
Photo by Justin Morgan on Unsplash