If you own a website, then you might have surely heard about SEO, SERP, and Onpage optimization as digital marketing jargon and the people talking about its importance. Developing a website and making it live on the internet doesn’t guarantee a listing on Google or other search engines. For getting talked about and searched on the internet, it is essential that the website is developed with the established norms and standards in a way that makes it easy for the search engines not only to locate your website but also enable the search engines to crawl and go through the website which is important to showcase the website on the search engine result pages as a result of the query search made by the user.
In order to achieve this, you need to focus on optimizing the website for OnPage. Daunting as it may sound, OnPage optimization is quite easy to achieve, at least to check and audit whether your website is optimized for OnPage or not. You can do this without hiring a digital marketing agency.
Please note that we are not negating the need to hire a digital marketing agency here, but at least by using these tactics, you would be able to get an idea of whether you need an agency to optimize your website for OnPage or not.
- Checking the TITLE tags: Title tags are the first thing to check on a webpage. Title tags are the identifiers of the page and should indicate what the page contains. It gives the search engines information about the page and what information it contains. As per a general norm, the title should be between 50 to 60 characters in length so the title does not get truncated in the search engine result page.
How to manually check the title tag:
– Visit a web page
– Right-click to open the menu and select ‘Inspect’ option
– In the Inspect window, look for <head></head> section
– <head> section will contain <title></title> tag.
– This is your ‘Title’ or ‘Meta-title’ of the page.
Possible errors in the title tag
– When multiple pages have the same title tags, it confuses search engines, and they are unable to distinguish between them.
– Having page titles above 60 characters or below 30 characters.
– Page title same as the H1 tag of the web page
– Page title missing - Checking meta description: A meta description is a brief synopsis of the page, giving the search engines an idea about the content of the page. While the title tag establishes the context, the meta description gives an idea about the content of the web page. It is necessary that the meta description matches the content of the page and shouldn’t be misleading, i.e., the description is different, and the content of the page is different. Meta description should be between 150 to 160 characters in length for better performance.
How to manually check the meta description:
– Visit a web page.
– Right-click to open the menu and select the ‘Inspect’ option.
– In the Inspect window, look for the <head></head> section.
– <head> section will contain something line <meta name=”description” content=”…”>.
– This is the meta description of your page.
Possible errors in the meta description
– Missing meta description.
– Meta description over 160 characters.
– Multiple pages having the same meta descriptions, which are like title tags, confuse the search engines. - Checking the H1 tags: The H1 tag is usually the first headline of the web page. It gives the weight to that line and an order of precedence in the entire page. A text with an H1 tag will have more weight in terms of the search engines’ interpretation as compared to the other H-tags and normal text tags such as <p>, <li>, and so on. We can include the keywords we want to target in the H1 tags that will benefit our website. Ideally, there should be a solitary H1 tag per page.
How to manually check the H1 tag:
– Visit a web page.
– Right-click to open the menu and select the ‘Inspect’ option.
– In the Inspect window, look for the <body></body> section.
– Perform a search in the inspect window and search for ‘<h1>’.
– If there is only one H1 tag, and the content of H1 is the main heading of the page, then your H1 tag is perfect.
Possible errors in H1 tag
– Missing H1 tag on the web page.
– Duplicate the H1 tag on the website where more than one page has the same H1 tag.
– Multiple H1 tags on a single web page. - Image optimization with ALT and TITLE attributes: Optimizing the images is an important aspect of the OnPage optimization of a website, as we don’t want to focus only on Google search but Google Images as well. Apart from the benefit these attributes offer in the image search, ALT and TITLE attributes are a must from the Web Accessibility Guidelines view, where it is necessary for a website to be easily navigable for the differently abled population. The ALT attribute gives the image an alternative text to be displayed in the case where images cannot be displayed. The TITLE attribute gives an identity to the image which assists in the image search made on the search engines. It also assists some of the accessibility software in using it as a source of information.
How to manually check the ALT and TITLE attributes:
– Visit a web page.
– Right-click on any image to open the menu and select the ‘Inspect’ option.
– In the Inspect window, look for the <body></body> section.
– In the <img> tag, look for the <img alt=”…” title=”…”> attributes.
– This indicates whether that image has ALT and TITLE attributes.
– You can also hover over the image, and if the tooltip appears, then the TITLE attribute is given to that image.
Possible errors in Image optimization:
– Missing ALT and TITLE attributes.
– Size attribute missing.
– Improper naming of the images. - Correct Internal Linking: Internal linking is an important aspect to establish the relevance and navigation between the pages of the website. Internal linking establishes a web of navigation on the website. It acts as a guiding light not only for search engines but also for website visitors. Search engines and website visitors, while looking for the content, are able to jump to the related pages based on this web of internal linking.
Internal links are easy to find. These are the hyperlinks within the content, which, when clicked, redirect you to the other relevant pages within the website.
Possible errors in internal linking:
– Internal links pointing to pages that have been deleted or moved without proper redirects.
– Overloading pages with excessive internal links.
– Pages that have no internal links pointing to them, i.e., orphan pages.
– Having an inconsistent or unclear linking structure, with no logical flow from higher-level pages to deeper pages. - Robots.txt: Robots.txt is an important file of a website that acts as a guide for the search engines to get an idea about the pages of the website that they are allowed to access, which are the pages that are restricted for the search engines to crawl, and thereby not index on the search pages. Every website must have a single Robots.txt file with the same name. It’s a simple text file that resides on the server and is the first file that a search engine will look for. This file has a specific syntax.
How to manually check the robots.txt file:
– At the end of your website URL, just add ‘/robots.txt’ and press enter.
– This will open a file, if it is present, which will look like this:
Sitemap: www.example.com/sitemap.xml
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Possible errors in robots.txt:
– Accidentally disallowing pages or sections of your site that you want to be indexed.
– Incorrect syntax of the file.
– Incorrectly assuming that URLs are case-insensitive.
– Failing to block sensitive content from crawling.
– No indication of the sitemap file of the website. - Sitemap.xml: A sitemap.xml file can be considered as an index of the book for search engines. The web page in the sitemap.xml file is taken into consideration for crawling and ranking on the search result page. This file provides the ability to assign priority to highly important pages. It allows you to specify the change in the content of an old page as well.
How to manually check the sitemap.xml file:
– At the end of your website URL, just add ‘/sitemap.xml’ and press enter.
– This will open a file, if it is present, which will look like this:
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>https://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2024-10-16</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
Possible errors in sitemap.xml:
– The URLs included are incorrect and missing in the file.
– Incorrect URL format of the pages.
– Incorrect use of the tags of sitemap.xml.
– Duplicate of the URL in the file.
The list of tasks to be checked for OnPage optimization is endless, and there is no fixed process. Digital marketing is all about continuously making changes and optimizing your website to ensure that the results are obtained as expected. While hiring a digital marketing agency will surely assist in deep diving for errors and preparing a comprehensive report of your website’s health, these pointers will assist you in analyzing your website on a high level. A website development company that specializes in creating websites normally has an in-house team to assist the developers in making the website SEO-friendly during the time of development itself. This is the best practice to be followed.
