On-Page SEO for General Contractors

Header tags come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but ultimately do the same thing. They help give search engines more context about the content covered in different sections of your page.

There are technically 6 different ‘levels’ of header tags. H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6. 

The lower the number, the higher the importance. The H1 tag is the most important, H2 the second most important, and so on. 

Typically, there is only a single H1 tag, and that is located at/near the top of the page.

H2 tags are commonly used as subheadings throughout the page.

Title tags are descriptive titles of pages that search engines look at when displaying your page on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

When you look something up, the description is located underneath the title tag, and is usually limited to 920 pixels long. 

People love images. Google does too, but it can’t fully understand images, yet. To help Google understand what images are of, there is a feature called “alt text” that SEOs fill in with descriptive text of the image to help Google “index” it.

Images can also be very large in file size, which is a bad thing for site load time. There are some awesome tools out there that compress images so that they look nearly identical, but are smaller in file size.

Search engines want to show the quickest loading websites first. It’s only one of the many ranking factors, but a very important one nonetheless. There are many things that can impact load time. Image sizes, how much code there is, how many redirects there are, etc. can all play a role in bogging a website down.

So backlinks are great, but what about links on your own site to other pages on your own site?

These are called “internal links” and they’re very important to help search engines get the most context possible when looking at your website. They don’t pass as much value as backlinks do, but they help search engines understand content better, which is extremely important!

Which of these links would you click on? 

example.com/2021-jan-learnwhatisonpageseo/

Or

example.com/learn/on-page-seo/

URL structure helps search engines understand what is on your page, but also helps instill trust in people that are trying to figure out which website to click on while looking for whatever they’re looking for.

Keep it lean and clean.

It’s 2021. Cyber security is huge. The biggest things search engines are looking for are Secure Socket Layer licences (SSL).

These are a little bit complex to explain, but ultimately, they are certificates that help secure your website. There are free and paid options out there, but at the end of the day they all do roughly the same thing. 

Having an SSL license allows you to use https:// in the url instead of http://

Anything SEO related that occurs on the website, is considered on-page SEO.