4 Fundamentals of Onsite SEO – The Basics

Onsite SEO is one of the most important concepts to understand when it comes to search engine optimization. As someone who has taken several courses learning about digital marketing, here are the five fundamentals you need to know regarding onsite SEO.

1. Knowing the Difference Between Onsite and Offsite SEO

There are two types of SEO, onsite and offsite. The main difference between the two is onsite SEO is strictly search engine optimization for things on your website. This can be assets like the navigation headers, meta descriptions when your website is searched on Google, or header tags at the top of blog posts.

Offsite SEO on the other hand is how the rest of the internet views your site. Examples of offsite SEO are things like backlinks leading to your site, having influencers promote your site, or social media engagement. Both of these types of SEO work hand and hand, which means if your onsite SEO is doing well, offsite will likely be effective as well. It’s important to note that offsite is significantly harder to control compared to onsite.

2. Utilize Extensions to Have the Best Possible Onsite SEO

When using services like WordPress, there are plenty of free extensions available to make sure your onsite SEO is optimal. One software I found super useful when I was just getting started was Yoast SEO. The extension was embedded into WordPress, and it allowed me to make sure my new posts had the best possible SEO.

Yoast has a feature when you are writing a blog post where it will give you an optimization score based on how effective your post is SEO-wise. Yoast will tell you what’s wrong with your post, and also provide solutions that allow you to fix any issues it detects. Yoast also allows users to directly edit content like meta descriptions and image alt attributes.

There are plenty of other extensions that serve the same purpose as Yoast. While I have not tried all of these softwares yet, I recommend trying Rank Math, SEOPress, and All in One SEO if you need free software to help optimize your blog posts.

3. Image Alt Descriptions Are a Hidden Onsite SEO Feature

A lot of assets that play into SEO aren’t even visible to users who view your site. One of the most important invisible assets is image alt descriptions. These descriptions are only visible on HTML, and they serve as keywords when someone uses a search engine. Yoast SEO does a really good job allowing WordPress users to easily add alt descriptions to images, and it’s only beneficial to be adding alt descriptions to every image on your blog posts. As a matter of fact, every image on this post all have alt tags.

4. Avoid Having Your Page be Considered Spam

One of the biggest downsides to onsite SEO is the risk of your page being considered spam. It’s important to be careful when posting, and there’s a lot of mistakes you might be making that can negatively affect your site’s performance. One common way of being considered spam is if you overdo certain keywords. It’s important to space out some keywords strictly once per section (in the header, once in the body, etc.). 

Another common mistake is writing articles that aren’t readable, and prioritizing SEO instead. You should be writing blog posts with a human-first mindset. This is related to the first mistake I mentioned with using the same keywords too many times in the same section. This is done by focusing on clear sentences with a natural flow. 

Conclusion

So these were four fundamental things you should know when understanding onsite SEO. It’s a very in-depth topic, so these four points are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to onsite SEO. Expect to see me make a similar list soon for the fundamentals of offsite SEO, so be on the lookout for upcoming posts.