If you’re completely new to SEO you guys might’ve heard the terms on-page and off-page SEO but what does that mean?
There is this separation of the work that gets done to grow websites, theres a lot of work that gets done ON a website - these are things that we do to our website to help google understand our website.
And then there are things we do outside, so OFF our website to help our website grow thats off page. That has more to do with Link building, social and building a reputable brand.
In my personal opinion - this is the easiest part of SEO that you cannot get wrong. If you do your on-page correctly you will honestly be in a better place than a large majority of websites since most website owners have no idea how they need to structure their content.
I want to give you guys a really basic template of 5 things that every page should have - so any page that has traffic potential.
Lets get into it:
Obviously before we get into all of this we need to make sure that we've done our keyword research to know what keyword we're going to sprinkle throughout our content.
1. Headings:
I talk about this a lot in most of my videos but making sure that we're adding in the correct headers throughout our content is essential.
- We need to make sure we understand the hierarchy of headers and we add atleast one h1, and then we use h2's and h3's as subheadings.
- Take a look at the video for how ahrefs is setting this up super cleanly on their content.
2. Title + Meta Description: - We want our title to have atleast 50 characters and at most 60 characters. We want our meta description to have 160 characters max since after that Google will cut off our info.
- We ideally want to make sure that both our title and meta description include our main keyword or atleast some variation.
- We also want to be extremely mindful of what that title looks like, we need to make sure that its semi-clickbaity so that we get people clicking and get a decent CTR.
- If you're on wordpress I highly recommend checking out either YOAST / All in one / Rank Math all of these plugins will help you set those title and meta descriptions on wordpress.
3. Keyword in the URL. - This is a minor one, but its a best practice of mine. Thats how I knew that Ahrefs was targeting that keyword in their blog, it was placed in their H1 and also conveniently in their URL!
- If this is something that you have access to, then I highly recommend doing it, before we create that page with traffic potential, otherwise it's best just to leave that page as is, no need to get involved in redirects and all that.
4. Image Optimization - This is a big one. - Images are usually the main reason why our websites take so long to load, theres a lot of things we can do here but without getting too deep into the weeds lets talk about 2 main high impact things we can do.
4a. Compress your images, look at something like tinypng.com they will compress your images super easily and it really makes a significant difference.
4b. Add image alt text, this is something that we add to help google understand what that image is just a little bit more. It's really important to understand that google doesnt see images in the same way that we do so its important to add this tiny bit of text to help google. We don't need to over-do this, no need to spam this with that main keyword.
5. Internal + External links
Once we understand how authority is passed in Google's eyes, we need to really understand internal links and external links. In the next few videos we'll talk a bit about link building but what we have to avoid when we start posting content is creating a bunch of orphan pages. Thus, when we're posting new content we need to make sure we're adding in internal links from other relevant pages with authority and traffic.
On-page is a pretty big topic and theres a few advanced topics that i didnt cover like structured data / page speed/ coreweb vitals as well as user experience and some more technical things so if you’re interested in that check out the link to my course in the description.
Timestamps: 0:00 Episode 5 of this Free Beginner SEO Course! 0:08 What is On-Page SEO? 0:38 Why On-Page is so essential 1:00 The 5 point On-Page template 1:28 Don't forget your Headings 2:50 Title and Meta Descriptions 3:45 Main Keyword in our URL 4:23 Work on your images! 5:32 Internal + External Links - Pass that authority! 6:45 Focus on this before everything 7:15 Theres so much more to On-Page SEO
