These are the 5 basic steps that you should follow when you’re trying to optimize any web page. You would use these steps whether you were trying to optimize your home page, a sub page, a post page, or any other type of page. The basic rules of onsite SEO are always the same.
1. Make sure that your keyword appears in the HTML title tag of the page you’re trying to optimize. This is without question the single most important factor of onsite SEO. Yes, you can still get a page to rank for a keyword without having the keyword in the title, but it will be much more difficult.
2. Use the keyword towards the top of the page in a bold (or large) font. If you’re using WordPress or Blogger to create your site, this will be taken care of for you by using your keyword in your post title. If you’re creating a site in hard HTML, make sure you use your keyword as part of a bold title at the top of the page.
3. Use the keyword within the text of the page. Many SEO sites will tell you that you must use a certain percentage of keyword density to achieve optimum rankings. In my experience this isn’t true. However, it’s wise to use the keyword two or three times on the page. If you have an exceptionally large amount of text on the page (more than 1,000 words), you can get away with using the keyword more often.
4. Use at least 300 words of total text on the page. You can of course get a ranking with less textual content. Actually, you can get a ranking with no content at all. However, this will make it much more difficult. If we’re going for optimal pages, they need to have 300+ words of content.
5. Use the keyword in a link that points to another related page. This aspect is easily taken care of by using the keyword as a tag or label with blogging software like WordPress or Blogger. Those using a static HTML site will have to create another page within their site that they can link to. You could also link to a related page on another site, except you would then be passing some link and keyword authority to a potential competitor. Unless you could get them to pass it back, I don’t think that would be the best idea.
Many people will tell you that onsite SEO is much more complicated than this – it honestly isn’t. Follow these steps for each page you need to optimize and you’ll do at least as well as you would by following more complicated systems. You will also be safe from potential keyword stuffing penalties from Google and other search engines.
Tags: google, onsite SEO, SEO, white hat SEO
What about meta description?
Meta description doesn’t affect rankings, but it can help you to get a better click through into your site!
Thanks for the reminders Court – it’s always good to read some White Hat methods for SEO – and to remind us how simple they are. I’ve been working with pages in WP on one of my niche sites and didn’t notice the tag option as there is with posts – I’m off to investigate now.
Clare tags can really help you in a few different ways. Each time you create a new tag it creates a new page for your site. Increasing the size of your site is always a good thing. It can also help with keyword authority because getting more URLs in your site that are based around relevant keywords, the better.
Hi Court
Good to have you back and posting.
“Many people will tell you that onsite SEO is much more complicated than this – it honestly isn’t.”
Yes… and no… it depends; it depends how many terms you want to optimise for; it depends how competitive the environment is you’re operating in; it depends how good you want to be at it!
Onsite SEO can be considered simple but Zen can be considered simple but the deeper you dig the more complex it is.
To whet your appetite to the full beauty of onsite SEO why not try a post from somebody I regard as a sensei of onsite seo -
http://www.seo-theory.com/2008/10/08/palindromic-seo-makes-seo-palindromic/
Cool stuff
Great article and soooooo useful!
Sometimes the basics are the things we usually forget! Thanks for the reminder.
Thanks for the easy checklist.
nice seo article, thank you.
Hi Court,
Long time reader from the previous site. (Are you still using it?!) Just a quick question regarding the advised articles on a page. You mentioned having 300 words per page. Usually I add an article to a page and allow them to stay on the same page for up to 8-10 articles. Is it a good idea then to stick to one page per article (If the article in question is over 300 words long) ?
Keep up the good work.
Cheers
Vlad
Vlad I’m probably not going to be blogging on the other site, at least for a while. You will find my new stuff right here. Vlad the more content you can get on the page the better, as long as all of the content is unique to that page. 8-10 articles on a page would be great as long as they all related to the topic and were unique to that page.
This is an incredibly helpful post. Thank you so much!
Great article very appreciative
and informative.
Keep it up…
This is the 3rd time I’m reading this article. It’s simple and easy to follow:) I’m gonna link to every article here on my new blog.
I think this article does a pretty good job of covering all of the basics about onsite SEO. You’d be surprised at how many well-ranking sites out there don’t even follow these steps!
Very good article on SEO, I found it very informative and helpful!
Very Good SEO Stuff ,,,, sooooo Heplfull !!
Just wanted to thanks for the valuable info about SEO. I use ProfessionalOptimizer.com for my SEO services and have been very happy with the first page ranking resut for my websites.
Nice Article. Very helpful for the SEO newbies.. Thanks!
Hey dude,
I am a creative designer and dealing with logo,website and print material.
but i have never been working on my on website.
with the start of website how many step i have to follow to make my website accessible from google and people can easily work online with me.
Thank you,
Abuzer.AD
Hey dude,
I am a creative designer and dealing with logo,website and print material.
but i have never been working on my on website.
with the start of website how many step i have to follow to make my website accessible from google and people can easily work online with me.
Thank you,
Abuzer.AD
Excellent information.
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Lets say you found a set of keywords that you want to focus on. Is it wise to use them all on one page or is the rule of thumb, one per page?