Onpage seo - improve your visibility in search engines

For any website owner, one of the most important elements to website visibility is your search engine ranking. And to improve your ranking, you need to invest time and resources into search engine optimisation. One of the most important elements of SEO, though, is known as onpage SEO.

Your website can be optimised both on your own website itself and through its links and associations with other websites. The most common elements involved in onpage SEO include:

• The type of keywords that you are using on your webpages, and how relevant they are
• How repetitive your use of keywords can be, and how natural your content reads
• The speed of your website in general and how quickly each webpage is going to open
• The variety of content i.e. is your content simply lots of text, or a blend of text, images, and videos?
• How relevant your content is to the topic at hand, and how relevant your tags and headers are

This covers only a small selection of what counts towards your onpage SEO, but these are some of the most important elements. When search engines are trying to evaluate your website, these are the factors they will look at the most.

As mentioned above, the speed of your website is a very important deciding factor in onpage SEO. Low page loading speeds will lead to high bounce rates, meaning people who visit your website and then leave quickly. Quicker page loading times – you should be aiming for around two seconds per page on a good internet connection – will result in more people staying on your website.

The average internet user will last around five to ten seconds, maximum, before they click back and try a different website. So, if search engines spot lots of people leaving your website due to poor loading times, it will impact on your onpage SEO results.

The best ways to improve the loading speeds of your website are varied, but some of the best solutions include:

• Ensure that the back-end of your website coding is clean and without confusion
• Compress files using tools such as Gzip to ensure there is less data to unload
• Cleaning up the media library to ensure there is no bloat or redundant media files
• Minify your CSS and JavaScript to ensure they are capable of running smoothly
• Reduce the volume of HTTP requests being made on your website
• Change to a stronger website host that can deliver a faster, more consistent performance

Carrying out the above would likely provide a big boost to onpage SEO simply due to your website loading times being drastically improved. If your website cannot hit the 2-3 second mark for page loading times on a decent internet connection, you might need to make some changes on the back-end.

A common challenge for many older websites is that they might still be using depreciated tags. These older HTML tags will eventually no longer be supported by modern website browsers. This means that your website might begin to render incorrectly. Not only does this impact on the user experience, but it will impact your SEO ranking due to the number of users who will be unable to use your website further.

The same also goes for using external script and stylesheets. Many websites store these externally, but if these are not linked in properly then it can lead to a website not rendering properly. This means that the design will not appear as intended, which can lead to problems with the layout of the website itself. By storing any JavaScript used and any CSS stylesheets internally, though, you reduce the risk of these problems taking place.