6 Critical On-Page SEO Factors
6 Critical On-Page SEO Factors
Two main factor are considered when search engines review and decide what rank to give your web page:
1) The content on the page and how relevant it is to the search terms people use. This is called on-page factors. The nice thing about these is that they can be easily optimize… it’s simply a matter of editing your content or keyword meta data.
2) The search engines look to see how popular your website is on the web. That is, how many other sites link to yours? Are the sites with links to yours popular and have a high page rank? Is the link a context link or a graphic ad link? This is called off-page factors. I’ll talk about off-page links in another post.
Experience shows that the off-page factors are more important in determining your rankings than do the on-page factors. But, on-page factors are still important. On-page optimization is probably not going to get you the top spot on page 1 of the search results. However, it could mean the difference between being on page 4 or page 1, or being 1st or 4th on page 1.
Here are the 6 critical on-the-page SEO factors:
#1: Put your number one keyword phrase in the <title> tags.
<title>keyword phrase</title> tags show the title of your page. The keyword phrase between the title tags doesn’t show on your web page. It does show at the top of the browser window in what is called the “Title Bar”. And, it shows in the clickable text at the top of the search engine listing. Using your keyword phrase between the title tags is important as it tells the search engines what your page is about.
For example:
If your page is about how to plan a garden, then the title of the page would be: How to plan a garden | Garden Planning.
I used the pipe (|) separator to add extra keywords. It looks natural and the search engines love it. The pipe seperator is on the key above the Enter key: Hold down Shift and press the Pipe key.
Here’s a different example: This time the page is targeting the keywords: Removing Carpet Stains. You write the title of the page Removing Carpet Stains | Carpet Stain Removal.
This may sound very “No Crap, Captain Obvious”. However, if I had a nickel for every time I have seen a page called “Home”, “Index”, or “New Page”, I’d have a lot of nickels.
#2: Always use the keyword phrase you are optimizing in the <h1> tags.
H1 tags are the headline tags: The search engine spiders read these first to determine what the content of your page is or is suppose to be. If the spiders find your optimized keywords between the <h1> tags, they see it as relevant for that search term.
H1 tags produce a rather large and sometimes unsightly headline and therefore many people won’t use them. However, it is pretty easy to change the style of the H1 tags in the CSS style file or with a HTML editor so they look good and grab the search engine spiders’ attention.
#3: Include the keyword phrase at least once, but no more than twice in the first 50 words of the written content.
Most search engines consider the first 50 words on your content to be more important than the remainder of the content. Make certain you include your primary keyword pharase at least once in the first 50 words. However, DO NOT stuff the first 50 words with the keywords as the spiders can see this as a form of spamming.
#4: Include the keyword phrase at least once every 100 words in the content to achieve a keyword density of at least 1%.
As I mentioned in #3, keyword stuffing can be seen as spamming, but your keywords should appear a few times in the content of the page. It’s recommended that a keword density between 1% and 4% be attained. Don’t go any higher than 4%, or your page will look like a spam, and can be penalized. Here is a free keyword density tool.
#5: Your internal page links should contain your keywords.
Have you heard the phrase “Google bombing”, this is where a lot people link to a specific web page using particular phrase or word and rocket that page to the top of the search engines results, although the page may not be related to phrase at all. The search engines use the words in the anchor link text to determine the nature of the content on the page it is linking to. This happened a few years ago with the phrase “miserable failure”. A group of bloggers used that phrase as anchor link text that went to a site that sold President George W. Bush memorobilia. The site skyrocketed to # 1 within 24 hours for the phrase “miserable failure”. Google now watches for extreme situations like that one.
However, you can use it to your advantage for your on-page SEO, giving your pages a boost for the keywords you want.
For example, how many sites have you seen where you return to the “Home” page of the website by clicking a button or link labeled “Home”? A lot, I’m guessing. Every one of these sites is missing out on free and quick keyword optimization. They’re optimizing their index page for the keyword “Home” when it should be optimized for their primary keyword phrase. You could change the “Home” to read “Garden Planning Home”, “Carpet Stains Home”. This gives you a boost for “Garden Planning” or “Carpet Stains”. If the primary keyword phrase for a page is “On-Page SEO”, then link to it using the text “On-Page SEO”.
This applies to all the pages on your site. How many times have you seen the text link “Click Here” for another internal web page? Are they really trying to optimize for the phrase “Click Here”? I seriously doubt it.
#6: Content is king.
There is no substitute for well thought out and written original content to help boost your site’s ranking. Search engines don’t want to show 50 websites with the same exact content. It is bad for business. That is why many search engines have a “duplicate content penalty” for websites that have content very similar or identical to content on another website. Since the search engine doesn’t know who the original author of the material is, it penalizes every site that shows it. The only way for the search engine to determine who may be the author is by the date the content was published live to the web. The penalty is usually a lower ranking than if your content is all original. Your site won’t be banned to the dark recesses of the ether.
This does happen often, especially for the people that use private label rights (PLR) articles, where hundreds or even thousands of other people might be using the same article. You must rewrite the article to make it unique. Add a paragraph at the beginning and end of your own words, use synonyms, and move the paragraphs around, if possible. Change the article by at least 25%, and preferably 50% for safety’s sake.
The best option is to write your own original content or get it written for you. Use a professional service like oDesk to find good content writers. You want visitors to stay on your site as long as possible. If they click away within 15 seconds, the search engines believe your content wasn’t a good match to the keywords that generated the search result.
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