On page SEO is everything to do with your site itself. This includes things like it's content, design, linking structure, speed etc. This part of SEO is definitely the easier side that you can take action on straight away.
On site SEO isn't a difficult process unless you're dealing with a site with a massive amount of pages and it's neglected SEO for so long. The time-consuming part of any on-site work is the content writing, a website needs to be updated on a regular basis and what better way to do this than adding content. The other aspects once they are done they are done. Now like I said if you've got a website with thousands of images and none of them have ever been tagged then yes you have a big job ahead of you but once you do it the job is complete.
If you are doing SEO for a new website then you are in luck, if you carry out all of the processes from the beginning you will have what is called an 'SEO friendly' website.
SEO Friendly
You may have heard this term being used before and what it means is your website can be easily accessed and crawled by Google making them more likely to index and rank your pages. Before you start thinking about link building you need to make sure you have a solid foundation first of all. When you have a new website you first want to make sure that there are no fatal problems on the site.
When I say 'fatal' I don't mean the site is completely broken with a big error message in front of you. I'm talking about the less obvious ones that most users won't pick up on but are in fact stopping you from being indexed at all.
A common Issue I regularly run into is the web design itself. A massive problem SEO's face is dealing with web designers who don't think about SEO when building a site. Now don't get me wrong this isn't necessarily their job so you can't place all the blame on them but it's important to always run an audit to see what kind of state the site is in.
I've had instances where someone has come to me with a website and asked why they aren't even ranking for their own brand name. When this happens the first thing I always look for is a no index tag. You'd be surprised at the amount designers that hand over a site they built on a test domain which they have deindexed understandably so, but they forget to take the tag away when handing the site over. This is one of the many simple mistakes that can ruin your websites rankings but from the front end, everything looks okay.
If you are carrying out SEO on an existing website, this is where things can be a little more frustrating and time-consuming. Web design just like SEO has many different ways it can be carried out. There are so many different platforms and templates for designers to use, some of which are SEO friendly, while others are the complete opposite.
Whenever you take on an existing website always make sure you take the time to research beforehand and run what is called a 'site audit' (I'll explain this further on in the course) doing this will help you gauge how much work is required and ultimately help you price up the job accordingly.