Today, many businesses and individuals have some difficulty getting discovered on the world wide web. With the time of potential consumers divided between social media and other forms of entertainment, both businesses and individuals need to find better ways to make sure their web presence reaches as wide an audience as possible. Fortunately, there is an entire practice that helps these businesses and individuals find immediate exposure on the Internet: on-page search engine optimization. By using on-page SEO for their websites, businesses and individuals are able to direct potential consumers to their websites without much issue. The entire practice of on-page SEO, when utilized correctly, has the potential to significantly improve how a website ranks within search engine results.
What is on-page SEO?
The practice of on-page search engine optimization looks complicated at first glance, but it is a relatively straightforward set of practices. On-page search engine optimization is best known as a practice that involves optimizing single web pages to eventually rank higher and produce more relevant traffic in the average search engine results page. The term on-page SEO refers to the HTML source code and the content for a web page, both of which are able to be optimized according to on-page SEO standards. By considering all of the individual factors of the HTML source code and content of a web page, on-page SEO combines the best version of those elements to help improve the search engine results ranking of a web page.
Reasons to use on-page SEO for improving website rankings
There are many reasons why on-page SEO is widely used today. The most common reason, however, is pretty simple to understand: the use of on-page SEO helps owners of web pages earn more visibility on the world wide web. The current practices of on-page SEO approach achieving web visibility by modifying and enriching certain elements of a web page. Some of these essential elements include meta tags such as title tags, meta descriptions, and heading tags.
Meta tags provide search engines with information about any given web page. These web page elements get placed in the head section of the code of a website and help define the contents of the web page. When used properly, a search engine generally reads these tags, compares the tags with the related keywords of the web page with the web page’s content, and determines a search ranking based on that information.
The meta description of a website shows what users will find on the web page when they encounter it during a web search. Search engines often read meta descriptions in order to sort and rank web pages according to the topic of the web page. Meta descriptions for both mobile and desktop websites should contain anywhere between 165 to 175 characters.
Heading tags are usually the tags that modify the lines of text above each paragraph of text on a web page. The h1 tag is the largest, usually used as the main heading on a page, while the smallest (h2 to h6) are primarily used as subheadings. The heading tags should be used to indicate what the web page is about, which is why many on-page SEO practices recommend utilizing keywords in these essential page elements.
