If we needed to explain On-Page SEO using one sentence, that sentence would be “Anything that happens within the website”. Websites know that they cannot expect Internet users to do all the work by themselves. It’s like the market: you have to offer to gain. This is where On-Page SEO comes into play. It represents all the practices websites have in their arsenal to achieve search engine visibility, increasing their traffic.

Getting a visit is the first step into setting the foundations of On-Page SEO, to establish a healthy flow of users that will not only visit your website, but will stay in it, and will return in the future. Therefore, it should not be a surprise that the most important rule of On-Page SEO instructs: Offer your users a great browsing experience. There are several aspects of a website that need to be in their “A game” for an excellent user experience to be achieved.

These aspects include, but are not limited to:

HTML & Tags

Why HTML first, you ask? All of the following On-Page SEO aspects are equally important, however, to read something, you first have to know the… language. Still with me? The reason HTML is so important is that it’s the language of Google’s ever-working, never-sleeping “spiders”. Google spiders are the digital entities that enter your website to gather information and understand what your website is about, to categorize it, filter it, and then tailor it to the World Wide Web.

Google “spiders” will enter your website, download a copy of its HTML code, and analyze it. A lot. Like detectives checking for all the little details hidden behind your beautiful content, they will visit your tags, check them, and then store your website’s core information for future use. When a user searches something, search engines return results gathered and tailored by “spiders”. Your titles, descriptions, headers, and tags, all of these are under… investigation and the more relative they are, the better for your ranking.

Website Speed & Mobile Access

Back in 2010, Matt Cutts, then head of the webspam team for Google, announced that site speed would carry less weight than other key ranking factors. This changed fast, as it was expected, with Website Speed being one of the cornerstones of SEO. After all, think about yourself when you are browsing through the Internet, searching for something. Don’t you want the best possible speed to achieve browsing optimization? Well, everyone does!

The era of having something in your grasp instantaneously is already here. Mobile phones and smartphones are the epitomai of immediacy, giving users access to the Internet from anywhere. Great SEO, among other things, is great Mobile access. Make sure your website is as polished and fast as its desktop “sibling”, and you will notice the difference immediately.

Content

One of the cornerstones of SEO: the Content! This is the reason users click on that link and enter your website, to access your content. Whether you are providing information, services, or products, your content has to be sparkling if you want the user to stay, return, and suggest it to others.

The pillars of Website Content are simple:

• Quality — No need to be tempted to go down the keyword rabbit hole. Make sure you answer your visitors’ questions. Google’s bots are made to tailor all information together before ranking your website
• Research — Before presenting users with information, confirm it. Research every web page content before presenting it. Facts make content foolproof and show users your website is trustworthy
• Freshness — SEO, as the king of the Internet, leads by example regarding freshness. Every day new SEO tactics are being developed and tested. Likewise, your content should be fresh, following the era’s needs and aesthetics
• Engagement — Knowing when to offer content, to whom, and how, leads to increased engagement, which leads to better search engine ranking. Your users are the ones with your website’s fate in their hands
• Detail — Content length plays a big part and despite it being a gray area, SERPs will let you know that the bigger your content, the better. Creating engaging articles of more than 2.000 words tailored with images and useful information will make users stay and read on

System

Website Speed and HTML are part of the System side of On-Page SEO. In this aspect, you will also find S.E. Indexing and the importance of URLs.

S.E. Indexing, or Search Engine Indexing, collects, parses, and stores data to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval. Without an index, search engines would have to scan every possible document gathered by “spiders”. It is not difficult to assume that every search would take huge amounts of time to complete, and S.E. indexing helps to minimize that by creating an index with categories. Understanding how S.E. indexing works allows you to improve your search engine ranking greatly.

Regarding URLs, they are the Alpha and the Omega of the Internet. They play a big part in the fundamental aspects of SEO and user engagement. For example, choosing a top-level domain instantly strengthens your URLs, since people tend to trust URLs that end with “.com” more than others. Creating shorter URLs helps users understand the nature of the link faster and more easily, while the first 3 to 5 words of a URL plays a crucial role in keyword density and relativity for your content.

Black Hat

Well, word has it you can find anything on the Internet. And since anything includes shady stuff, it was expected that shady ways to find things would also exist. Black Hat SEO techniques are against search engine guidelines and often end in a penalty from said search engines for anyone using these techniques.

Black Hat SEO includes keyword stuffing, private link networks, and cloaking, among other things. Keyword stuffing might ring a bell for those that used the Internet in the early days of SEO, during the mid-1990s. Google’s description of keyword stuffing is the following:

• Lists of phone numbers without substantial added value.
• Blocks of text listing cities and states a web page is trying to rank for
• Repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural

An example of keyword stuffing will help everyone understand it better. Let’s see a piece of content with keyword stuffing from a website selling stainless steel kitchen cutlery:

“We are in the business of stainless steel kitchen cutlery. Stainless steel kitchen cutlery is what we sell. If you are thinking of getting stainless steel kitchen cutlery, get in touch with one of our stainless steel kitchen cutlery consultants.”

Cloaking is the technique of showing one piece of content to users visiting a web page and a different piece of content to the search engine checking that web page. Moreover, private link networks are used as “banks” for links of websites of the past or closed-down websites to “fool” the search engine that a web page has links that create engagement and increase the ranking of a website.

Let us be clear that we do not support any form of Black Hat SEO tactics and we believe they are the equivalent of unfair marketing techniques used outside of the Internet. They are built on shaky foundations and most of the time will lead users to places they never wanted to be.

Tags: Black Hat SEO, Content SEO, HTML SEO, On-Page SEO, SEO