Onpage SEO

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Index of content

01. Extensive knowledge and practical experience
02. What is a title link?
03. How do you include the correct information in the title?
04. What is a meta tag?
05. What are the meta descriptions and the AIDA principle?
06. How long should a meta tag be?
07. What is an H1 heading?
08. Maintain existing content
09. Why do you need topic-relevant content?
10. How should you optimize your images?
11. Optimize internal links
12. What is keyword cannibalism?
13. Eliminate orphan pages
14. Technical SEO
15. Check HTTPS
16. Check URL structure and page depth
17. Include cannonical attribute and check duplicate content
18. Create 404 page and check 404 errors
19. Use structured data and Schema.org
20. Implement browser caching
21. Set website compression
22. What are the Core Web Vitals?
23. Mobile-friendly website (Mobile Response Page)
24. Check internal and outgoing broken links
25. Find and fix redirects loops
26. What is the hreflang attribute?
27. What is pagination?
28. FAQ

Extensive knowledge and practical experience

The onpage optimization can be done by a competent SEO manager. Extensive knowledge and above all practical experience are necessary prerequisites for good on-page search engine optimization. It is recommended that you acquire SEO knowledge yourself by reading it, but get advice from an SEO manager on practical on-page optimizations.

The following elements are optimized for on-page SEO measures

What is a title link?

The title link <title> is the most important optimization parameter of a website. It is prominently displayed by search engines and requires precise language from the web author. You should describe the page content with the title link as clearly as possible and pay attention to the line width of the title. It is good to know that Google displays different title lengths on SERPs, namely 580 pixels in the desktop view and 920 pixels in the mobile view.

How do you include the correct information in the title?

The title length is very important, but it is even more important than the title conveys the right information and signals to the searcher at first glance what is behind it. A missing or not optimized title link can have a significant impact on the CTR (click-through-rate).

In the title link, the most important keyword on the page should come first. It should match the H1 heading on the relevant page. In this way, the important information title link and H1 heading are matched or, better said, linked, thereby increasing the page relevance at the same time. The title links optimized by means of onpage SEO are perceived positively by both the user and the Google crawler. Here you can find more information about the title link.

What is a meta tag?

The meta description or meta tag is a summary of the page content. The meta tag only describes a single page, so you should create an individual meta description for each page. A well-designed meta description could stimulate a klick in the SERPs and can be seen as an indirect ranking factor.

What are the meta descriptions and the AIDA principle?

With good SEO onpage optimization, the meta descriptions are created on the basis of the AIDA principle. The abbreviation AIDA stands for (Attention) attracting attention, (Interest) arousing interest, (Desire) triggering desire, and (Action) initiating action/purchase.

It is important to mention here that the meta descriptions according to the AIDA principle should always contain the information from the side described. A meta tag created improvisely, e.g. B. with important USPs, which are not on the described page, is mostly not accepted by Google. Therefore, you should reproduce the information from the page and use unique content for the meta tags.

You should avoid duplicate meta descriptions in order not to produce duplicate content.

How long should a meta tag be?

With the meta tag length, it is important that you differentiate between desktop and mobile view. Google no longer measures the length in terms of characters, but in terms of the pixel width of the characters: for the desktop view 990 pixels and mobile view 1300 pixels, which corresponds to around 15-20 words. The free SISRTIX SERP snippet generator is very often used for a meta tag check.

To get more attention, you should use simple symbols in your meta descriptions, such as checkmarks, arrows, or stars. Your meta descriptions should be unique!

What is an H1 heading?

The H1 heading is the most important indicator of what content or information is on the pages and an important on-page optimization factor. It is essential that there is only one H1 on every page and therefore under every URL. In this main heading, the focus keyword should be placed at the beginning or even first so that the search engines can easily see what topic the page is about.

In the HTML coding, headings with the tags from <h2> to <h4> are provided. It is important to mention that you should use the headings <h2> to <h4> as often as necessary and of course pay attention to the correct order and semantics. The margin columns or the content areas can be created with the tags <h5> and <h6>.

“One Page, One H1” - One page or a URL, just one H1 heading

Maintain existing content

The search engines love new content. Out of date content leaves users with a negative impression of your site, as it does not seem to be maintained regularly. That doesn’t mean you should be creating new content every week. However, it is recommended that you make regular monthly content updates. The new content doesn’t have to be long, it is more important that it appears regularly.

Since 2011, Google has implemented a change in the ranking algorithm with the Freshness Update. This means that newly published content can rank better than the old one after a certain period of time.

Why do you need topic-relevant content?

It is also recommended to expand the topic-relevant content. You do not need to create subpages with a lot of text, but should set up topic-relevant landing pages. A search engine-optimized site requires complete coverage of topic-related content.

You should create the content in such a way that it gives you a larger topic coverage. This gives your domain the appropriate authority on the topic being dealt with. The focus should be placed on holistic content and prefer to value content quality. For onpage optimization, the goal your page having a great deal of subject expertise and thus becomes a subject authority.

Try looking at your well-ranking pages (with high content quality) from the user's point of view and ask yourself how well the content serves the corresponding search motivation of the users.

How should you optimize your images?

In onpage SEO, the images are very often neglected. You should consider the ranking signals of the images on every page and optimize your images. It is good to know that the ranking signals of the images are not generated from the images themselves, but from the surrounding information. You should therefore label the images well and incorporate suitable keywords directly into the image description. Well-labeled images can help the search engines to better classify the corresponding images.

The alt attribute or the alt tag plays a decisive role in onpage SEO. The alt tag increases the accessibility of a page and also helps the Googlebot to better mark the content of an image.

The image size should not exceed 200 kB

Optimize internal links

Internal links are recommended if you dive deeper into the topic and want to offer additional information on your website.

It is recommended that you use the focus keyword or main keyword of the landing pages as the anchor text of the link.

What is keyword cannibalism?

Keyword cannibalism is often used in onpage SEO. This term means that two of your pages (2 URLs) are optimized for the same keyword. The search engines and the algorithm cannot decide which of your pages is more relevant. If you have optimized several pages for the same keyword, it can happen that all pages suffer under a loss of visibility.

A good indicator of keyword cannibalism is that your site has large fluctuations in its SERP ranking. The solution is to optimize the affected pages for keywords with similar meaning and to use different long-tail keywords on the pages.

Eliminate orphan pages

It is recommended that you permanently remove pages that have lost their relation to the page structure of your domains. These pages usually receive no clicks, no internal links, and are almost never crawled by the bots. You can identify orphaned pages in different ways. The best way would be to compare a list of all of your domain’s URLs with a list of crawled URLs.

Technical SEO and Onpage SEO are inseparable from each other

The Basic Onpage SEO Check includes the most important necessary checks of your website

I. Check HTTPS

It is recommended that each domain has an SSL certificate and that HTTPS is used as the standard. You can decide for yourself whether your domain can be accessed with or without www. Most of the time, the www prefix cannot directly affect your page rankings. It would be important that you redirect the other three combinations to your domain.

Example: Your domain is: https://www.your-domain.de, then it is recommended to set up a 301 redirect for the following three prefixes of your domain:

• http://your-domain.de

• http://www.your-domain.de

• https://your-domain.de

A website that uses HTTPS also sends positive signals to users and signals a secure connection. This will make your website appear trustworthy and avoid the error message “This is not a secure connection” on your domain.

II. Check URL structure and page depth

The URL structure is of great importance for the user and the crawler. It is recommended that you set up the page structure hierarchically and logically well. It would be an advantage if SEF URLs (search engine friendly URLs) is used. You could include the right keyword in SEF URLs, but please without umlauts, everything in lower case and the long-tail keywords should be combined with hyphens (“-“). The page depth can be measured very well with Google Analytics. Among other things, your average visited pages for certain periods of time can be displayed. This helps to better understand and analyze the user behavior on your website.

III. Include cannonical attribute and check duplicate content

The canonical tag <canonical> is located in the <head> area and not in the <body> area of an HTML page. This tag is used to avoid so-called duplicate content. If for whatever reason you want to create multiple pages with the same text, you can use the canonical tag to refer to the original text. This procedure is important to let the search engines know where the original text is and which page should be displayed in the search results.

The canonical tag helps with onpage optimization when creating a print version of your page or with PDF documents that have the same page content. You should avoid duplicate content and use unique texts. Any duplicated content causes a big problem for search engines because they don’t know which of the pages should be displayed with the same content. The consequence of duplicate content are Google penalties and a lowering in the ranking.

IV. Create 404 page and check 404 errors

The 404 page is an HTTP error code message from your web server if the page you are looking for is not found. If you find many 404 errors on your domain during an on-page SEO check, then you should definitely redirect the incorrect URLs. According to Google, the 404 errors are not harmful, but they can lead to the page appearing neglected and the content no longer perceived as reliable.

V. Use structured data and Schema.org

Schema.org helps you to include structured data in your pages and to manage them. With structured data, you could help the Googlebot to better understand the information on your pages. You can create these markups or codings in different data formats: RDFa, microdata and JSON-LD.

VI. Implement browser caching

The implementation of browser caching helps you to control the caching mechanisms. The maximum duration setting with the help of the directives (max-age = <seconds>) helps you minimize repeated requests to the server and make your site faster. You can use giftofspeed.com to check your browser cache settings.

VII. Set website compression

It is recommended that you compress the HTML, CSS and JavaScript files and minimize the data transfer. Smaller amounts of data shorten the loading time of your website. The free compression program or file format “gzip” can help you with good onpage optimization.

What are the Core Web Vitals?

The Page Experience Update rolled out in June 2021 and from now on the so-called Google Core Web Vitals will be among the ranking factors. This update is aimed at page performance and usability on the web. In addition to the core web vitals, the following criteria include mobile-friendliness, HTTPS, safe browsing, and the avoidance of annoying interstitials.

It is recommended that you use the Core Web Vitals report in the Google Search Console to help you identify any problems. The following three matrices are measured for the Core Web Vitals:

Largest Content Paint (LCP) measures the loading performance. A good loading performance should be less than 2.5 seconds
First Input Delay (FID) measures interactivity. The interactivity of your website should be under 100 milliseconds
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability. Your page has good visual stability when the CLS is less than 0.1

PageSpeed Optimization - Largest Contentful Paint Optimization

PageSpeed optimization by preloading a responsive image - Largest contentful paint optimization in the Google Chrome browser

You can test these three Web Vitals metrics and the page performance of your website with various tools, such as B. Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights

Mobile-friendly website (Mobile Response Page)

The big advantage of a mobile response page is that a website with the same content can be displayed on different devices and display sizes. It is recommended that you use a so-called responsive web design on your website. Bootstrap (getbootstrap.com) can help you with this. As a potential ranking factor, the mobile-friendliness of a website is an indispensable part of good SEO optimization.

Check internal and outgoing broken links

You can check the internal links (links that point to the same website) in different ways. One possibility would be to use the free Google Chrome extension “Check My Links”. Before you start “Check My Links”, you have to open each individual page, then start Check My Links and manually check each page. A tedious but reliable process to identify broken internal links.

The outgoing links (links that refer to another website) or so-called backlinks are decisive for PageRank and the TrustRank. It is recommended that you check the number and quality of your backlinks at regular intervals. The fee-based tool ahrefs.com can provide you with a good overview of your backlinks.

On the offpage SEO page you get more information about backlinks.

Find and fix redirects loops

You would only use redirects if you change your domain or if you want to redirect the old URL to a new URL. The most common HTTP status codes for redirects are 301 and 302. You can check all your redirects with a free screaming frog crawl and crawl up to 500 URLs. A paid license is required for larger websites: screamingfrog.co.uk. A Screaming Frog Crawl can be exported as a CSV file and opened in Excel, making it very easy to analyze. It makes sense to check all crawled redirects and avoid redirect loops or redirect chains.

The free Google Chrome extension "Link Redirect Trace" can help you with individual redirect checks

What is the hreflang attribute?

The hreflang attribute helps with multilingualism and tells Google which content for which language or which country version of the website should be displayed on SERPs. In international SEO, you cannot achieve success without correctly using the hreflang attribute. If you have multiple languages on your website, it is recommended that you use a hreflang attribute for all languages.

You can find a free Hreflang Tag Generator Tool at: www.aleydasolis.com/english/international-seo-tools/hreflang-tags-generator/

What is pagination?

Pagination is used to distribute longer and similar content over several pages. This is usually a challenge for an SEO manager and requires a good SEO strategy. The first page of the paginated pages is often indexed and the others are provided with the meta-robots tag <noindex, follow>. It is important to mention here that with this method (<noindex, follow> from 2 pages), the canonical tag should be not used parallel on the same URL.

Large shops often use de-indexing from page 2 for the paginated pages

SEO

Here you can find more information about search engine optimization

Offpage SEO

Here you can find more information about offpage SEO

SEA

Here you can find more information about search engine advertising

FAQ

Due to the difficulty in separating onpage SEO and technical SEO, both areas will as a result be handled together. The goal of onpage and technical SEO is to change a website so that it appears in the first organic search results as possible.