On-Page Ranking Factors
When completing a website audit, on-page ranking factors play an influential role in deciding where your website’s pages land on the search engine results page. These factors are the influencing characteristics of each individual page associated with your website. These factors illustrate different aspects of your website’s SEO.
They include:
- URLs
- Clean and user-friendly URLs are imperative in withholding a successful website – it should be static
- Errors in Site Code
- Errors in site code are not something you can see when simply scrolling through your website, but search engine crawlers can. Resolving any issues with your site code is important in helping these crawlers go through your site and will help you rank higher on search engines.
- Title Tags
- Page titles are one of the most important on-page ranking factors and should be treated as such. These show up in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing use the title tag as the search results’ title for that page.
- Meta Descriptions
- These are the brief descriptions you find located under a website title listed in search engine results page. These help with organic search and click-through rate.
- Meta Keywords
- These are no longer part of SEO, and your website should not have any meta keywords on any pages of your site. Having them would allow competitors to potentially mine the keywords your site is ranking for.
- Header Tags
- These tags inform search engines on what the content of a page is about. It is a very important factor in on-page ranking.
- Alt Text
- Optimizing your Alt Text for the images on your site is important because this is how search engine crawlers “see” your image or video.
Website audits help outline these issues and include ways to resolve them. Through perfect optimization of these factors, your website will rank higher on search engines and ultimately prove themselves more trustworthy to search engine crawlers.
