Essential on-site SEO factors

With this post, I start a series of SEO related articles where I'm going to share my 11+ years experience in SEO to help you understand better how it works. The top-rated comment on Reddit in the post I saw last week What do you wish developers knew about SEO? was: «The most dangerous thing in SEO is a developer that thinks he understands SEO. They so rarely do». So this article is for developers who want to deliver a better SEO for clients and SEO beginners, as well as for the entrepreneurs, who are about to hire an SEO agency. You need to understand, why some sites are on top in search results and some will never be there.



The main task of any search engine is to give the right answer to user’s query (in SEO community we call it “meet the intent”; intent — identification and categorization of what a user online intended or wanted to find) as quickly as possible.



But how to identify “the best match”, how to find the best answer on the billion websites? The search engines have complex ranking algorithms that collect information from the websites, analyzing it, “giving” mark for quality and assigning position on top on its basis.

If you want to enter with your website to the top of the search engine results page (SERP), the website must have, first of all, correct SEO settings. That is where SEO specialist’s work consists of – to make website attractive and relevant both for user and search engines.

Search engines react to particular “signals” – off-site and on-site ranking factors. And today you’re going to learn some basics about the on-site SEO factors.

On-site SEO factors are website quality indicators, which can be directly managed by site webmaster (or SEO specialists). They may be divided into one-page factors and the general factors that affect all website.

Essential on-site SEO factors:

• website structure;
• internal links;
• usability (is it convenient to use website);
• content — text, photo, video;
• optimization of tags and headers;
• HTTPS;
• website speed;
• mobile-friendly.

One-page SEO factors

Images

“Correct” file name – it should include keywords relevant to this image and/or this page (depends on the situation). Keywords also should be used in Alt attribute of the image, sometimes, in the very rare cases, you can also use Title attribute of the image for this purpose to increase the page relevance.

Consider the quality of the image and its size. Low-quality images may frighten away user, an image suitable for text, vice versa, has a good influence on behavioral factors.

Be careful: images may “burden” page and adversely affect its speed. Try to find a golden mean between image quality and its size.

URL

URL is the web address of the page. If it’s possible, it should include keywords or name of the article, or other relevant information about the page, e.g. publication date. But just including a keyword in URL has a very low impact on search engine ranking algorithm. On the other hand, it has a big impact on CTR (ratio of clicks from SERP) and THIS becomes a very strong factor for search engines that your website attracts users’ attention in SERP. Google says:

Consider organizing your content so that URLs are constructed logically and in a manner that is most intelligible to humans (when possible, readable words rather than long ID numbers). For spaces we recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_)

Let’s compare two examples:

1. example.com/cars/mercedes
2. example.com/cat1458/gtxks-548652.html

It’s obvious that you want to click on the second address less and for the search engine such an URL is absolutely “empty”.

You can deliver even better experience. Use microdata to make URL more attractive in SERP. When SEO specialist adds “bread crumbs” to the markup, mostly an attractive URL chain will be shown in site snippet instead of the address. For example:

Header H1

Header H1 is a content header on the page. Yes, it’s that simple. Usually, this is one/two of the most high-frequency keywords relevant to this page, and it should describe page content properly. H1 is an eye-catcher for your visitors.

Title Tag

The title tag is your page title. Requirements to title are very simple: it should include keywords and be attractive for a user — create descriptive page titles. 60 characters are OK. Page titles should be descriptive and concise. Avoid vague descriptors like «Home» and avoid keyword stuffing like “Buy cell phone, buy phone, buy phone now, buy phone cheap”.

Remember, the first thing seen by a user in SERP is exactly the title and the decision to click starts from it.

Content

Content is particularly the reason, why the user took a decision to visit your website. Content should be completely relevant to the user’s search query. Content must meet the user’s intent and help the user to solve the problem.

Content may be different – it completely depends on the query. For example, for query “buy vacuum cleaner”, a user most likely expects to find a product or product listing and on the query “how to decorate a festive table for Easter” – an article with advices and photo ideas of table setting.

General on-site SEO factors that affect all website

Structure

Site structure is a logical web page hierarchy. Structure influences:

1. Site usability. It is convenient to use a logical website and it’s clear to most of the visitors.
2. Distribution of internal “link juice” (the value or equity passed from one page or site to another) of the pages.
3. Minimization of technical issues. The well-developed structure allows avoiding multiple issues – duplicates, empty pages, 404 errors, etc.
4. Acceleration of indexation and reasonable crawl rank expenditure. Sites with clear structure will be indexed quicker, as it will be easier for the search engine to crawl them.

Internal links

Internal links are the connection between pages. Internal links are actively used for “link juice” distribution. It’s a different very broad theme on optimization we will discuss later.

My own experience says it’s better to use 2-3 links per 1500-2000 characters of content.

Usability

Usability is the indicator of convenience and ease of website use. Nobody needs a complicated and unclear interface.

Usability has an impact on time spent on the website by the user and whether the user will go back to search results after visiting your website (one of the most critical ranking factor for search engines).

I saw a lot of cases when only having solved usability problem, a website obtained far more conversions and positions in SERP.

HTTPS

HTTPS is a safe data communication protocol in the network supporting encryption via cryptographic protocols SSL and TLS. Security is a top priority for Google.

Google in its Google Chrome browser marks the websites, where HTTP is used as potentially unsafe. If you are still using HTTP, immediately start planning a migration to HTTPS.

Website speed

Website speed is a time of your website loading from the moment of clicking link till the moment when the page is completely downloaded.

It does not need additional explanations that slow sites will never be on the top of search results – they irritate users. People quit slow websites, worsening behavioral factors, and search robots need too much time for scanning this kind of websites. I can endlessly list potential problems connected with a long page load.

Mobile-friendly

Mobile-friendly is website design, which is in the same manner correctly renders on desktops and mobile devices.

Traffic from mobile devices has long been prevalent, so the first step is to optimize the website to mobile devices (if this has not yet been done).

Summary

It is impossible to cover all internal factors by which the website is ranked – nobody knows the exact list. Start from focusing on basic on-site SEO factors, make them better than your competitors did.

• website structure — сonsider organizing your content so that URLs are constructed logically and in a manner that is most intelligible to humans;
• internal links — are actively used for “link juice” distribution;
• usability — тobody needs a complicated and unclear interface;
• content — must meet the user’s intent;
• optimization of tags and headers — 60 characters for title and H1 is an eye-catcher for your visitors;
• HTTPS is a ranking signal
• website speed — users quit slow websites;
• mobile-friendly — is a must.