Onpage

On-page optimization includes all content-related and technical measures directly on a website: clean keyword and heading structure, appropriate meta tags, unique content, internal linking, fast loading times, and good usability.

In search engine optimization, the term "Onpage" describes specific measures for optimizing a website that are editorial but also technical in nature. These are factors that the webmaster or a contracted agency can implement "on the website." Unlike Offpage factors (primarily backlinks), Onpage factors are not directly influenced by external conditions.

Onpage optimization should not be confused with onsite optimization, which involves optimizing an entire domain. Here, it is primarily about optimizing a single page within a website.

Importance of Onpage Optimization for Search Engine Optimization

On-page optimization obviously has great importance for search engines. Search engines like Google want to display the most relevant websites for a searched topic. Website operators can influence their site's ranking with good on-page optimization. Signals are set that show the search engine the relevance of a page and how the page is related to others within the domain.

Elements of Onpage Optimization

Often, it is only through tests that one can determine which elements are particularly important for Google's ranking. However, the following elements have crystallized as important for on-page optimization:

Keywords: They are one of the most important elements on a website. The selection of keywords in relation to the theme of a webpage is of enormous importance, as the main keywords should not only appear in the domain name, URLs, texts (including H1-H6 headings, body text), and meta tags. Keywords and related search terms (primary and secondary keywords) can also dictate the structure of a webpage.
Meta tags: Meta tags are specified in the HTML code. The following meta tags are important:
- Title tag: names a page and is used as a headline in the SERPs
- Meta-description: Describes the content in the form of a teaser
- IMG Title: names an image and thus increases the chance that Google lists a page in the image search results
- IMG Alt: The alt tag describes the content of an image and is displayed, for example, when an image cannot be loaded.
- Robots: determine if a search engine should index a webpage
- Canonical: Definition of a website with identical content and can signal to the search engine which page should not be crawled
HTML: With the help of HTML, a page is structured, which is appreciated by search engines. SEO experts advise placing important keywords in headings, which are marked in HTML with <h1>, <h2>, etc., for example. The leaner the HTML, the better it can be crawled.

Content and text design: When creating content, it is always important to ensure that unique texts, unique content, are produced with a certain minimum number of words. These should be created taking into account the respective keyword as well as the analyzed secondary keywords.

While just a few years ago, people were still striving for the right keyword density in the text, nowadays the wdf*idf formula is all the rage, showing the ratio of the main keyword to other terms within the text and websites with similar content. Visual content such as images, graphics, and videos, which can contain additional information, is also part of text design, but in any case, they provide the reader with a comprehensive picture of a topic. Duplicate content should be avoided at all costs.

Unique and high-quality texts increase visitors' dwell time on a webpage, which in turn positively influences the ranking. Additionally, customer satisfaction increases.

Options for publishing high-quality content include blogs, where articles or tutorials with videos appear, e-books, or whitepapers.

Links: Links are extremely important for both internal and external linking of a site. Internal linking is particularly significant for on-page optimization. A link can be placed at various locations on a website. It is important that the individual pages are sensibly linked to each other to make crawling easier for Google on one hand, and on the other, to indicate the relevance of sites. Websites have so-called link juice. When a website with good link juice links to another, the latter benefits from the good link juice.
URL: Keywords that are included in the URL have a high weighting, which is why you should ensure that the main keyword appears in it.
Loading times: A page should have a good loading time, both on the desktop and mobile. Because no one likes to spend a lot of time on a website that takes a long time to load. The loading time can be checked using Google Analytics or other tools.
Usability and Source Code: The usability (user-friendliness) of a website influences the bounce rate of users, which in turn affects ranking. Therefore, great emphasis should be placed on the usability of a website. At the same time, an error-free source code is considered important to, among other things, reduce the loading time of a website.

Basically, on-page measures should be implemented before off-page measures. Otherwise, there is a risk that a non-optimized website will rank in good positions. While good positions are desirable, it is only beneficial if the corresponding readership or customer base is present. In this sense, it makes sense to optimize both on-page and off-page factors equally.