Read & write

Search engine optimization is the process of improving your website so that the search engines, such as Google and Bing, have a greater likelihood of displaying the given site for a keyword search related to the topic of the website. Businesses and website owners want to achieve top rankings via search, so more targeted visitors come to the site. 

There are different aspects to search engine optimization, the most basic being separating two sets of factors. The two primary sets of factors are on-page optimization, with the other being off-page optimization.  In this article, we’ll examine on-page factors in more detail.

In on-page optimization, the factors that are being examined and improved for search visibility are related to actual adjustments and modifications made on the website that is being looked at. On-page factors include to such items as meta tags, meta descriptions, the actual on-page content, the page title, and URL to name a few. 

Meta tags and descriptions are keywords and brief descriptions that are placed in the website’s code. This meta data is used by the search engines, as they explore newly created or updated content. This actual process of crawling the web and noticing changes and new information is called “indexing.” 

Indexing allows search engines to continually include the new webpages and websites that are being added, as well as the updates that are being made to the items in cyperspace. The meta data is useful to the search engines for making sense of what these sites are about and which keywords are related. 

The content that displays on a website, including the keywords that appear in the website is important, as well, to provide further evidence and content to the search engines so that it can help determine how the webpages and site are related to the keyword searches. Fresh content, new information and proof of actual changes being made regularly, helps websites get noticed more often and found by Google, Bing and the others. This is one of the reasons that blogs tend to do well in search rankings and are popular for search engine optimization. 

The actual URL can give an indication of what a given webpage is about to the search engines. For instance, if the name of a page is “services.html” and this page is at the domain “abcpluming.com” then the full URL gives clues that this page is about “plumbing services” and the context of the content at that page, along with the meta data and other elements should support this. 

In a nutshell, that is how on-page search engine optimization works. Ideally, these different aspects of every webpage and website provide a string of clues that help the search engines understand what the page is about, what keywords it is related to, and how relevant and content rich it is related to a given search. 

When Google and the other search engines can quickly and easily understand what your webpage is about, your site is considered optimized and you should see benefit in how the site shows up in the search results.