On-site SEO, which is commonly confused with on-page SEO, is the practice of optimizing elements of a website as whole to encourage better performance, higher rankings, and more relevant traffic from search engines. Because on-site SEO addresses a website holistically (often tackling HTML code and technical elements), it’s a different than on-page SEO, which has slightly more emphasis on user-facing content, such as page copy and meta data (visible in the search results).
In turn, on-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual pages of a site, referring to both the content and code. Both on-site and on-page SEO have greatly evolved over the years, making it especially important to stay abreast the latest practices and maintain an updated website. To make it easy to understand our services in this area, we’ll summarize our processes below as on-site SEO.
Maximizing Your Site’s SEO Potential
In the past, on-site SEO had simple intentions – helping Google and search engines crawl and understand a site’s pages more efficiently. But on-site SEO today extends beyond serving search engines. Now, with user behavioral variables becoming more and more important, on-site SEO also helps users more clearly and quickly interpret what a page is about. And when done right, a page’s content should align with and address their search query.
In a nutshell, these optimization practices are intended to help search engines understand what a user would see if they visited a page. In doing so, search engines strive to evaluate just how relevant, accessible, and valuable that content is so that they can reliably deliver (rank) to users what is considered high-quality content for a particular
keyword phrase. While there are many off-site variables at play, maximizing a site’s SEO potential requires fully-optimizing all on-site factors available.
On-site SEO Strategy
While every on-site SEO strategy is unique, most projects will include several of the following components:
- Technical SEO – From canonicalization and media compression to SSL and optimizing a site’s HTML, there are several considerations involved in technical SEO. We employ an exhaustive, step-by-step checklist to better ensure sites are technically optimized.
- SEO Copywriting – More than just writing copy with keyword-inclusion, our SEO copywriting services speak to your audience in the unique tone of your brand. More importantly, we deliver copy that helps you resonate with and convert users on your site.
- Metadata – The most common forms of metadata, in an SEO context, include the page title and description. We can also help integrate other forms of relevant metadata for purposes of site discovery and identification.
- Structured Data Markup (Schema) – Commonly referred to as Schema, applying structured data markup helps communicate your site’s content more effectively to search engines. In turn, your site can benefit from enhanced search visibility.
- Sitemaps – Both HTML and XML sitemaps are important SEO communication tools that help facilitate proper crawling and indexing of your site’s pages.
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) – Hand in hand with technical SEO, the focus of CRO is improve your site’s conversion performance by optimizing user-facing elements on the front-end of your site.
On-site SEO become less and less about keywords and more about site performance. That is, your site needs to provide a quality user experience while ensuring its content is accessible and easily found by search engines.
At
Organic SEO Partners, we can help you audit and implement an on-site SEO strategy that aligns with your current site’s health and SEO objectives. Contact us today to get started.