When improving your site’s SEO, it is important to know the difference between onpage vs off page SEO. Off page SEO involves tactics like link building and the generation of referral traffic: essentially this is everything external to your actual site that improves its SEO.
Onpage SEO covers the internal elements of your site and its pages. There are a number of things you can do within your site to encourage higher rankings on search engines like Google. The use of keywords is the one we speak about most often, and this is important. However, this is by far the only type of onpage optimisation.
Both offpage and onpage SEO are important for optimising your site and should be given equal weight a part of your SEO efforts. In this article we are going to cover onpage SEO, specifically when it comes to onpage optimisation for WordPress sites.
Test Site Speed
Site speed is a technical SEO element which is often overlooked, but is has an important impact on SEO. Although the exact details of Google’s algorithm are closely guarded, Google has indicated that site speed is one of the factors it looks for when ranking sites on its SERPs. This makes sense for two reasons. Firstly, faster sites offer better user experience (UX), so it makes sense that Google would promote sites with a faster speed over those with slower speeds.
Perhaps more importantly, faster site speeds are logistically easier for SEO. When ranking sites, Google sends in bots to crawl every site and search for indicators. The faster your site, the more quickly these bots can crawl it, meaning they are more likely to find flags to show that your site is relevant to user searches.
You can test your site speed using online tools like GTMetrix or Pingdom. If you find your site speed is slower than it should be, there are a number of technical solutions you can implement to improve your speed.
