Last updated on November 1, 2018, 6:24 PM

SEO basics for on-page optimization of the website

For many people, the great discipline of search engine optimization is still a black box with many unknown possibilities. Since even small measures can make a big difference, I’ll try to give some help and tips in the next blog post series on the subject of SEO.

Table of Contents: What is Onpage Optimization? URL Optimization SEO optimizations for title and keywords of the page Pagespeed – page load time optimizations [How do I get a faster loading time now?](<#How do I get a faster loading time now?) [The rule of thumb for SEO optimization for images could be formulated as follows] Summary and quick measures for on-page SEO optimization

What is Onpage Optimization?

On-page optimization means making improvements directly on the website and thereby making life a little easier for Google and its crawlers (search engine indexing “robots”). Because this Googlebot crawls several billion websites every day in order to ultimately provide Google with the data in order to give us the most accurate result possible for our search on Google. Off-page optimization refers to “link building”, i.e. measures to get linked from other sites.

When it comes to on-page optimization as an SEO measure, there are of course thousands of things that you can do or that specialized SEO agencies can actually tackle in longer-term projects. I can’t go into everything here and that would go beyond the scope. But I’ll try to list the most important “quick wins” here that anyone with a little technical understanding can implement on the website they manage. In the broadest sense, all of these topics also belong to Online Marketing and also Growth Hacking.

URL optimization

A first step, especially when setting up a new website, is to set easily readable, sensible URLs and structure them on the website. Basic rules for a URL that is as SEO optimized as possible are:

it must be descriptive (e.g. like for this page: seo-basics-onpage-optimization)
as short as possible, maximum 74 characters, so as not to appear truncated in the search results
contain the most important keyword (search term) for the content of the respective page
should not only contain digit and character combinations that are not descriptive

Sometimes the CMS (Content Management System) of the website creates a URL that is very long or only consists of a combination of numbers and characters. Of course, this is not ideal and should be avoided. With WordPress, for example, you can simply choose the option to use the “post name” as a URL template under Settings -> Permalinks.

With other CMS systems there is certainly a similar option or, in the worst case, with self-built websites you have to ask the programmer to think of a variant that generates URLs according to a similar scheme for the respective individual pages.

SEO optimizations for titles and keywords of the page

The title of the website is also an important factor in the evaluation and classification of the page in Google search results. Similar to the URL, the most important keyword that best describes the content of the respective website should be included here. The page title is often described in the literature as a title tag or meta title because this element is in the head area of the HTML code of the website.

When it comes to the title of the website, please note:

should contain the most important keyword for the page
Be descriptive and appealing, informative for users (since the title usually appears in search engine results)
not be too long so as not to be cut off in the search result (max. 55-70 characters including spaces)

When creating a new (sub)page or blog post, you should always consider what the topic of the blog post actually is and which keyword (or search term) best describes this post with a word or a simple combination of words. This means you have your keyword ready and have determined which one you can use to optimize the text.

This keyword should then be used a few more times in the text and ideally also once in a heading on the page. There are also countless statistics, approaches and suggestions. For WordPress and Typo3, the Yoast SEO Plugin provides wonderful help here and you get a good feeling about how often you should use a keyword on a page.

Basically, Google is getting smarter and better at recognizing the content and context of a website and trying to make its own considerations in order to give the user the best possible search result. This means that it can also happen that Google does not even show the title of the website that I specified in the search result. In order to quickly optimize the website, I would recommend not getting lost in too technical details but simply writing good, informative texts with a nice, easy-to-understand structure, because Google is becoming more and more humane when it comes to capturing texts :)

Structure of the headings and structure of the content of the page

The structuring of the website content also plays a role in search engine optimization. As with an easy-to-read document in Word, Google also rewards a good and easy-to-read website. Therefore, it makes sense to have a well thought-out structure with just one H1 heading and several H2 headings and, if necessary, also H3 headings below the H2 heading sections.

Paragraphs after 3-4 sentences definitely make sense to increase the readability of the text. The Yoast SEO plugin (for WordPress and Typo3) also helps very well here and shows nicely in the traffic light system whether the text has been well structured.

Pagespeed – page load time optimizations & image sizes

Since page speed, i.e. the time it takes for the user to load a page, has always been and continues to be an important factor in the evaluation of the page, you should NEVER upload images in their original size that are several MB (megabytes) in size to the website.

The heavier (more megabytes) a page is, the longer it takes the page to load and the worse Google rates it.

For a quick test of how quickly your own site loads, I recommend quickly running the Pagespeed Insights from Google tool, or using Pingdom Tools to test the speed of your own website. [Backlink.io] impressively determined how important page speed is in a study](https://backlinko.com/search-engine-ranking) with over 1 million websites.

The optimal loading time for a website to be considered sufficiently fast by Google is currently around 2-3 seconds. Although even faster is of course better. However, I only recently heard that the loading time of most websites in Germany is on average 7 seconds. It’s probably best to look at your direct competitors and if they have a website that loads much faster, you should act quickly but don’t blindly just optimize until you drop.

How do I quickly get a faster loading time?

This is where image optimization comes into play. Unfortunately, I still see very, very often that customers use images that are far too large (or actually too large in terms of file size) on the website. Now why is this bad? Because a large file, and images are often the largest files on a website, cause longer loading times than small files.

Images should therefore be compressed, or care should be taken to use smaller images. Because compression means the file size is reduced = it can be loaded faster. There is also a lot of debate about the optimal image size (in file size), but a good average is that most images on the web must be a maximum of 1000 pixels wide.

However, the image is often taken directly “unprocessed” from the smartphone or camera and is then usually at least 3000 pixels wide. In most cases, however, the image on the website is displayed much smaller because the CMS or website structure simply dictates it that way. So you uploaded an image that was 3000 pixels wide and actually only showed the user a reduced version of 1000 pixels or even much smaller, which meant you had to load an unnecessarily large file that couldn’t show its full potential (size in pixels).

The Pixelwerk blog has written a very detailed treatise on the subject of image sizes on the web and correct formats.

The rule of thumb for SEO optimization for images could be formulated like this:

Choose the correct image format (usually .jpeg)
Always consider the maximum image size that is actually displayed on the website (usually not > 1000 pixels wide) and then reduce the size of the images accordingly before uploading
Always compress the images to at least 75% of the quality for .jpeg files (since you can hardly see the difference between 100 and 75% quality on the web)

There are also top tools on the web for compressing and reducing the size (in pixels) of images, such as: imagereduce.com or compressjpeg.com if you are not very familiar with Photoshop or the operating system tools of Mac & Windows. Instead of Photoshop you can also use GIMP as a free version.

In addition to image optimization, there are a variety of more technical optimizations that you can also tackle, such as CSS, Javascript optimizations, optimizing server infrastructure, etc. But as I said, these are more advanced methods. More on that in a later blog post :)

Summary and quick measures for on-page SEO optimization

Simple SEO homework is not rocket science and therefore everyone should get started immediately and at least optimize their website a little for the search engines using these simple steps.

In summary, the first steps for on-page optimization would be:

Consider a keyword or a keyword combination that best describes the content of the page
Make URLs meaningful, descriptive and not too long and include the most important keyword
Make the title of the website interesting, descriptive and not too long and also include the most important keyword
Use the most important keyword sensibly in the text, but don’t overdo it
Make sure the text is well structured -> use a sensible hierarchy of headings
Resize and compress images

This has already done a lot and if you have a good analytics system you can quickly see the improvement in the ranking of your site for your keywords.

Don’t miss any more blog posts? Click here to register for our newsletter.