A Complete Guide to Onpage Optimization

Onpage Optimization or Onpage SEO is one of the main factors for good ranking in search engines. It is one of the first important steps after creating a website. If your website lacks here, you cannot rank well despite of all your efforts. It increases the overall visibility and reputation of your website and also gives your website a better exposure to both human visitors as well as search engine bots.

Why it is so important?
Search Engines have their own algorithm to determine the SERP (Search Engine Ranking Pages) of a webpage. Onpage Optimization connects your webpage to that algorithm and tells everything about it. If you have a poor onpage optimization, search engine might get wrong information on your website and push it down. It also tells search engines about the correct niche so that search engines can correctly categorize your website.

on page optimization A Complete Guide to Onpage Optimization

What are On Page SEO Techniques?
It’s a vast area within the SEO files and pretty easy to understand. I have here tried to summarize some of the most important factors of onpage optimization so that you can understand what it is and how it works.

Head Section Optimization
Some of the important webpage elements reside in head section of a webpage. To be accurate, the contents with in <head> and </head> section of the source html. Search Engines read this section prior to everything and collects the necessary information on the topic of the page.

Webpage Title Optimization: It’s one of the most important factors of a webpage. Search Engines show the webpage title in their listing and you really should optimize it by including some of the keywords in it.
Meta tag Optimization: Meta tags are the elements which tells search engines how to treat your website. Adding or removing them can directly impact your ranking. Some of the important meta tags are:
- Meta Description: It’s the snippet or description that search engines show in the listing right below the title of the webpage. Adding keywords in it will give you some advantage in Google’s relevancy algorithm. It looks like <meta name=”description” content=”your description” />
- Meta Robots: There are various meta tags to operate search engine bots, but none of them are valid today because of advancement of the search engine algorithm except the index,follow tag. If you don’t have it, search engines will proceed and index the page. This is used when you do not want search engines to crawl and index the page. It should look like <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow” />. The other variables are index,nofollow and noindex,follow.
- Meta Keywords: It’s no longer in use and avoided by all the major search engine spiders as this can be easily manipulated. But, it does have effects on other meta search engines.
- Feed Link: If you offer feed from your website, adding a link to head section helps search engines to find and index it. It also helps to find the feed automatically if not mentioned anywhere in your site. It also tells browsers about your feed so that people can subscribe to it. It is not quite a meta tag, but a link and should look like <link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”Your Website Feed” href=”Feed URL in full” />.

Body Section Optimization
It’s the main section of a webpage where the content and other visible elements reside. As this is the main section, it should also be well optimized to get a high ranking. It resides between <body> and </body>

Content Optimization: Content is the key element of any webpage. It is what determines the overall ranking of a webpage. The content should be completely unique and full of information. When search engines find unique content on a webpage, it pushes it higher. There is no trick here except inserting the keywords wisely in content body. But, overdoing it may cause a penalty due to keyword stuffing.
Image Optimization: Image optimization is also has equal priority as content optimization. With proper Image Optimization, you can receive enormous amount of traffic from search engines if you rank for a competitive keyword. Keep the memory size of the image as minimum as possible and always add width, height and alt tag with the image. It should look like <img src=”" width=x height=y alt=”" />.
HTML Tags Optimization: Heading Tags are the main element for HTML Tags Optimization. Search engines give the top most priority to h1 tags in heading and then comes h2, h3, h4 etc. So, always use H1 tag for the heading line of you content and must include some keywords in it. Apart from that marking your important keywords or key phrases with bold font (within <strong></strong> tag) or in Italic (within <em></em> tag) also helps.
Navigation Optimization: A good navigational structure also helps search engines as well as human visitors to read and navigate your site easily. It also helps search engines to categorize your site and index it better. URL Structure also falls in this category. Using dynamic URL and session time in URL reduces the visibility and should be avoided. Always try to include a few keywords in the URL and search engines show the URL in listing and keep it as short as you can.

Footer Section Optimization
Footer section starts where content section ends. It’s the bottom part of the webpage. Normally no optimization is needed, but surely requires attention as little important information on your site can be placed here.

Links: Normally, all the outgoing links are kept in this area. Like, copyright, powered by, and designed by links. Try to keep it as less as possible as search engines detect most of the footer links as paid.
Important Information: You can keep your business information here. Like your address, telephone number, support link etc. as it doesn’t interfere with general view of your website yet can appear on every page. A genuine address with phone number can highly increase your website’s reliability in search engines as well as in human visitors.

Those were the basic techniques on Onpage Optimization or Onpage SEO. There are lots of other factors that can affect you search engine ranking. I’ll come up with them shortly, so keep coming back or subscribe to my RSS Feed.