On Site Search Engine Optimization - A complete Guide for 2025

Introduction to On-Site Search Engine Optimization

So you're publishing great content, building backlinks and posting regularly on social media, but your website still isn't ranking on Google where you want it to?

You've followed the advice of the guru's and still aren't seeing the results that you want. There are may possible reasons for this, but a key one is that your on site search engine optimization might not be up to scratch.

In this guide, I'll talk you through exactly what on-site SEO is, why it matters and how to know if you're doing it well.

I'll give you the playbook that I use on my own sites as well as what I do with my clients sites.

Whether you are a soloprenuer trying to get your SaaS company to rank, or you are managing a large company but need that extra organic traffic, there should be something in this on-site SEO strategy guide for you.

What is On Site Search Engine Optimisation?

On Site SEO is the practice of optimizing elements of a website to help improve it's visibility to search engines.

At a high level, these are the core things on your site that you can optimize to help you in the rankings:

1. Well structured HTML
2. SEO Optimised Content
3. Internal Linking
4. Page load speed
5. Metadata
   
6. Structured Data
7. Technical SEO
8. Optimising for mobile devices

These are all things that you are able to control yourself by changing (as the name implies) things on your website. We'll cover all of these more later on in the post.

This differs from "Off Page SEO" which is the process of trying to improve your business and websites visibility across other portions of the web. These are things like gaining backlinks to your site, having social media profiles, getting brand mentions in relevant forums and various other things.

The important of on-site optimization for SEO

On site SEO really does lay the groundwork for all other aspects of SEO optimization.

If your website is so riddled with issues that the search engines can't crawl or understand what your site is about, you stand no chance of being ranked.

On site SEO helps search enginers interpret, categorize and rank your content.

Also, if your off site SEO optimization is great and people are being directed to your website from other sources (not search engines), and when they arrive everything is slow to load, you've broken images, links that send people to nowhere and users can't navigate your site well, that's a bad look for both your business and to the search engines themselves.

How on-site SEO impacts search engine rankings

Google quite rightly puts a lot of emphasis on a websites on page SEO. There are a few reasons for this.

1. Google has limited "crawl budget" (the compute time it uses on assessing a website). If your site is hard for them to navigate, they just won't do it often.
2. If your site has bad on-site / on-page SEO, it's likely that the users that go there won't have a good experience and will "bounce" (leave the site). It's not a good look for Google if they send their users somewhere that's a bad experience. For Google's own sake, they want to only send their users to sites that are nice and easy to use.

If you have your basic on-site SEO checklist sorted (Keyword placement, site speed, crawlability, UX signals), you are far far more likely to be ranked well.

Optimizing Website Structure and URLs

You'll hear me talk a lot in this guide about the fact that a lot of what makes on-page SEO good for humans also makes it good for the crawlers (search engine robots!). Well here's another one.

A well structured and laid out website is not only for a human to navigate, but also for a web crawler to navigate and understand.

Let's take a look at what that means, using this very website as an example.

If you take a look at the above screenshot, and look closely at the URL, you'll see that it's very human readable and tells the user and Google exactly where you are on the site.

The URL looks like this:

https://www.visiblein.ai/blog/content-optimization-for-seo/

So top level domain "https://www.visiblein.ai/", followed by "blog" to denote that we aren't in the sales pages or the services pages, but where we write the blog content, followed by "content-optimization-for-seo", so this portion of the blog is entirely related to content optimization for SEO. It's very clear for the reader, and very clear for the search engines crawlers.

Now, if you take a look at this image, which is a blog post itself, you'll see that we just add one more layer to the URL above. This time, the full URL is:

https://www.visiblein.ai/blog/content-optimization-for-seo/optimizing-for-google/

So this time, we are in the same section of the site as above, the blog content related to content optimisation for SEO, but this time we are specifically talking about "optimizing for google".

Again, clear, concise and immediately understandable by humans and search engines alike.

Best Practices for URL Optimizaion

URLs should be short, readable, descriptive and contain the keywords that you want that page to rank for.

Don't use symbols, numbers or dynamic parameters.

Make sure that your URL patterns are consistent across the site.

The role of "Breadcrumbs" in SEO optimization

Breadcrumbs for the uninitiated are like what Hansel and Grettel used to get back out of the forest. You drop some breadcrumbs along the path in order to be able to find your way back along the same path.

If you take a look at the above Blog, you'll notice the following text:

Semrush > Blog > SEO > Technical SEO

These are breadcrumbs. They tell you that you are currently on a page within the Technical SEO section. The Technical SEO section is a part of the SEO section which in turn is a part of the Blog section.

At any point, the user could decide to click on any level of those Breadcrumbs and be taken to that area.

These are excellent visual markers for quick navigation and help the web crawlers to navigate your site easily.

Breadcrumbs also give a better "contextual hierarchy" i.e. the ability to understand slightly more about the current page based on the area of the site that it is in.

In the example above, the page "Breadcrumb Navigation for Websites" is a part of the "Technical SEO" section. Therefore, Breadcrumb Navigation is considered as a Technical SEO item.

Organizing your Site Hierarchy

There are a few key elements to remember when organising your site hierarchy:

1. Important pages should not be more than 3 levels deep from your home page
2. You should have no "orphaned" pages. i.e. every page should be linked to internally from at least one other page
3. Make sure you have a Sitemap.xml file setup to show Google and other search engines your site more easily.

Content Optimization for SEO

Now that we've talked about general cross site topics, let's dive more in to "Content Optimization", a specific area of SEO optimization.

SEO optimised content is content that is written in a way to give very loud cues to search engines as to what your page is about.

Rather than hoping that the search engine will pick up on what you are trying to convey, you are much more directly telling it.

SEO friendly content is content that follows these basic principals:

• Including your primary keyword the URL, opening paragraph, title, one header, image alt text and closing paragraph.

• Including "semantically related" keywords throughout the page. If you are writing a post on Gardening Tips, you'd expect to see keywords such as "seeds", "flowers", "grass", "manure', "sunlight", "seasons" etc.

• Talking about relative "entities" to your key topic. Writing a post about online market places, you'd expect to see reference to eBay, Amazon, Etsy etc.

• Good use of headiings. Your page structure should follow good H2, H3, H4 content structure.

• You should have internal links to other pages in your site

• Include external links to high domain authority sites that would also help your users.

• Good use of Schema Markup. You can use free Schema markup tools to check these.

Strategies for creating SEO friendly content

Keyword research comes first. Before you write a single word, you need to decide on what your primary "keyword" (search term) is going to be.

I use Semrush for this, but you could use AHRefs or any number of other keyword research tools.

The key is this though: Stay in your lane.  Don't try to rank for "Best Car Tyre" when you are a very small, low authority website on hobby mechanics. You are not going to beat Pirelli and Michelin on this. 

Know your domain authority and use that to judge what you can rank for.

Once you have a keyword, use a tool like RankReady to generate you a content outline with the relevant semantic keywords, topics and entities that you should include. This is just a cheat sheet to getting well optimized for SEO content.

Match the users intent

Every client of mine, or any other SEO, will be sick of hearing this, but it's so important. I'll say it loudly so those in the back row can here:

YOU NEED TO MATCH THE USER INTENT!

When you are writing your content, you need to know what the user is trying to find out.

Chances are, if they are searching for the phrase: "How to change a car tyre" and they land on your page which is discussing the best tyres for off-roading, they aren't going to be best please. This will lead them to quickly "bounce" off your site which basically tells Google "don't send people this way again".

I always makes sure that before I write a single word, I actually run the Google search and take a look at the top results. This is a quick way to tell you what the user is looking for. If the top 10 pages are all sales pages, you shouldn't write an informational piece. If the top 10 results are all to one website, it's likely that this search is people looking for a specific brand. Take a look, do your due diligence.

Writing good content takes practice and time, but eventually it'll come as a second nature.

Publishing Schedule

I think this is less important than it used to be, but it's not a bad practice to continue.

Don't make Google and people guess when your next piece might go live. If you publish a new article every Friday, make sure you don't miss.

If nothing else, this will hold you accountable to getting more content published.

Enhancing Visibility with Metadata / Meta Tags

Meta data is the shop window to your content.

Your Meta Title and Meta Description are the first and only thing someone may see of your site in the search engine results pages (SERPs).  Use them wisely. Spend time crafting them.

AS you can see above, you don't get much space of room to convince people that of all of the links on the Google search results page, they should click on yours.

Your meta title and description should be optimized for two things:

1. Your target keyword
2. People to click

They should have intrigue and also a promise that your site is going to be the site that solves the users query.

You need to be optimizing your meta title and descriptions for the highest "CTR" (Click-Through Rates) possible.

If you are ranking in the top 10 on Google for search term but getting no clicks, chances are you need to re-write your Meta Title and Description to make them more enticing.

Some best practices for Meta Titles and Description:

1. Use "Power words" - Best, Top, Leading etc.
2. Include your primary keyword in both.
3. Make sure the Meta Description gives enough information to make the user want to click, but leaves enough intrigue that if they don't click they feel like they may miss out.
4. Include dates where appropriate - "Best.... 2025" etc.

I've had pages that get very low CTR in the past, and just by tweaking a few words in the title and meta description have significantly increased my CTR. There's a whole human psychology aspect to Meta Titles and Descriptions that's really worth investing in learning. 

Technical Aspects of On-Site SEO

Within On-page / on-site SEO, there's a whole subsection called "Technical SEO".

Let's break down the major aspects of Technical SEO:

Mobile Optimization and Responsive Design

Roughly 60% of all searches are made from mobile devices. If your doesn't load quickly or look good on a mobile device, you are falling behind and losing valuable traffic.

Here's my check list of tools and things to check:

1. Use Google PageSpeed Insights to check how fast your page loads on both Mobile and Desktop devices
2. Use your browsers "Mobile Responsiveness" tools to look at your site in different browser sizes
3. Use AHRefs free webmasters tools to run a site audit to identify large images that make take time to load on a mobile device.

This is a good checklist and place to start to make sure you are mobile ready.

Improving site speed and Core Web Vitals

As with mobile, desktop also cares about page load speed. You can use the same PageSpeed free tool to see how quickly your site loads.

If you need to improve your page load speed, here's the start list of things to check/do:

• Compress your images. An image doesn't need to me any more than 1Mb really when viewed online. That's perfectly good enough to get a good, high quality image. Depending on the image type (webp, jpg etc), you can get higher quality with lower size as well.

• "Minify" your CSS and Javascript. When in development, you need to be able to read your CSS and Javascript for debugging purposes. When you are "live", you don't. For this reason, you can "minify" your CSS and JS and have it remain perfectly functional. At the most basic level, minification is reducing the amount of characters used to reduce the total size of the file. For instance, you may have a javascript variable called "shouldBeAuthenticated". This in a minified version of the file may be reduced to "z" and all references would be changed to "z". imagine the effect that this has on tens of thousands of lines of code or style sheet. You can use free tools to do this.

• CDN

• A Content Delivery Network. Hosting your files on a CDN is usually quicker than having them loaded from your webserver itself. They are held in near cache and able to be returned to the clients browser much quicker. This speeds up page load times.

SSL Certificates and Website Security

Google wants to make sure the users it sends to you are safe and their data will be safe with you as well.

Ensuring that you have SSL (Secure Socket Layer) means that the users data is always encrypted between the browser and the webserver. It's therefore safe from "man in the middle" attacks.

Link Optimization and Internal Linking

Link Optimization plays a key role in on-page and on-site SEO.

Making sure that each of your posts is linked to as many relevant pages in your site as possible, once again is helpful for the user (to navigate around and find more useful information) and the web crawler who is trying to understand your site.

Many studies have been done on the difference between sites with good internal linking and sites with bad internal linking and the data is extremely clear. Good internal linking leads to higher ranking pages on a site.

You'll want to make sure that you have appropriate link text and that the link is contextual. i.e. if you are linking from a page about the migration of bats in the southern hemisphere to another page on oil leaks in 1960s british motorcycles Google may get confused. You link text gives Google more information about what the page is about as well, so make sure that's descriptive.

Linking from a page with "high authority" (a lot of good backlinks) to a page with "low authority" (a page with few backlinks) also passes some of that authority (page rank) around. This can be useful to boost low ranking pages higher in the search results pages.

Advanced SEO Techniques and Tools

As with everything, what can be measured can be managed.

Enter SEO tools.

You'll want to start tracking your progress, both in terms of what you are ranking for, and then how well your content does when users get to your site.

Google Search Console is free and the only tool you'll need to track which keywords you are ranking for. This will show you how well your intentions of what keywords you are trying to rank for match to those that you do rank for.

Google Analytics if the main tool (and again free) that you will need to track the most basic but useful metrics about users on your site:

1. How long does each user stay
2. What are your most viewed pages
3. Do you have a high "bounce" rate
4. Do users come for one page and end up viewing other pages.
5. What is the "Scroll depth" of each of your pages
6. Much, much, much more.

With these two free SEO tools alone you can go a long way to understanding how well your on site search engine optimization is going.

Beyond these, you can perform site audits (free through AHRefs Webmasters tools and ScreamingFrog) to identify technical SEO gaps.

SEO is about continuous improvement. There is never the perfect article. The landscape changes, SEO practices change, user behaviour changes. You can not "publish and forget". Once your post is live, track it, see what's working, tweak some things and see if that helps with your rank in the search engine positions.

SEO is there for the long term. You will need to work at it!