This is part 2 of a series on understanding SEO. If you’re a newbie to this world, read our article on SEO Core Concepts and then come back… Are you back? Great! Now that you understand the anatomy of a Search Results Page and what a Keyword is, you’re ready to dive into on-page SEO.
What do we mean by “on-page?”
On-Page SEO Terms
These are terms that relate to your website’s pages. Optimizing these for both your potential website visitors as well as including keywords for search engines is incredibly important to your website ranking and, more importantly, converting clicks into customers.
Your Search Snippet
Whenever you use a search engine and get a page of results, you’ll notice that the links describe what is on the page and you’ll see a description of that link. SEOs can fill this information out on the back end of the website to influence how your site displays on search engines like Google, Bing, etc. This is broken down into title tags and meta descriptions.
- Title Tag – The clickable headline that appears in search engines. The description of where that link will lead a searcher.
- Meta Description – The short snippet of content that appears under the page title tag in the search result. The “why” you should click. This meta description is a good opportunity to quickly sell your site with actionable words.
Great. You wrote an enticing meta description and title tag and now the search engine understands what your site is all about. You have encouraged a searcher to click on your site. How is your content organized?
- Headings (H1, H2, H3) – Headings should appear throughout the page and serve a dual purpose, to inform users of what content is on the page and to inform search engines of the hierarchy of importance of the content, helping to determine searcher relevance. Headings also help readers and search engines understand the content hierarchy. Your h1 describes what the page is about (on this page, our h1 is “What is SEO? Part 2: On-Page SEO”), while an h2 will delineate a content section (on this page, it’s “On-Page SEO Terms”) and an h3, h4, etc will typically be a subsection of that content (here, “Your Search Snippet” is an h3).
Within the body of your content, you of course know how to work in keywords organically, but there are also a few other terms you should know, if you want to get into SEO.
- Alt Text – Like many of these terms, alt tags also serve two roles. Alt tags are pieces of text written into the code of your website that describes what an image is. This is important for search engines to understand what your images look like since they can’t literally “see” them, but it’s also an important accessibility feature, enabling screen readers to describe images to visually impaired people.
- Internal Link – A website is a living, breathing organism, in a way. Internal links are any time you link from one page on your website to another (like that!). Like an organism, connecting pieces together internally helps the site function better for both usability and for search engines. When a page is linked multiple times throughout the site, search engines know that page is important.
Think of on-page SEO as laying a solid foundation for your website: clear structure, engaging content, and accessibility features all working in harmony. With these basics in place, you’ll be ready to move on to the next layer of SEO, Technical SEO.
And remember, if you need help with your web strategy, get in touch with Posture today!
