On page SEO is often overlooked by marketers. There are many aspects of off-site search engine optimization that almost every SEO marketer is familiar and aware of, including link building, blog commenting and social bookmarking and tagging for external meta data. Don’t forget however, that there is an entire practice of site structure, keyword density and on-page factors as well.

There are some standard, bread and butter practices that you must do to optimize site pages for on-page SEO, which may result in a higher rank for each of your site’s web pages.

Here are the on-page SEO essentials :

1. The Title Tag – The MOST important aspect of on-page SEO, just take our word for it. This must contain your main keyword.
2. The Meta Keywords, Description and Robots tag — Google used description copy to market your site in its results, treat this as optimized sales copy. Make sure your sitemap.xml page is CONSTANTLY called up to the search engines.
3. The Body Text – focus on the body text in bold, for this denotes strong emphasis to the search engines.
4. The first sentence in the body text and the first words used per sentence are the most important ones for advanced on-page SEO necessities (Make it humanly readable and SE readable — The words used in the first sentence are most important due to the implementation of Google’s LSI algorithm)
5. The URL — The subdirectory folder and page of content should be SEO’d (i.e. http://www.iLearnInternetMarketing.com/ebook-internet-marketing-strategy would likely fetch a high ranking for a page dedicated to ebook internet marketing strategy- especially with many highly authoritative, relevant, deep in-bound links).
6. The H1 and H2 Texts are highly important – Why? They show the search engine the main subjects and Table of Contents for the content to be indexed. Make these keyword friendly and reflective of your page’s title tag.
7. Same Site Link Texts — The links connecting the pages of your site together must have your targeted keyword terms in them as well as all links throughout the site — even though it seems excessive, having variations to your targeted keywords would also help when linking out to other pages within your site.
8. Same-Site Link URLs — Not only should you be using your keywords to describe pages within your site, those URLs you link to must have SEO URLs ( eg: http://domain.com/your-keyword.html)
9. Outbound Link Text — Resources you link to must be SEO’d – If you are an internet marketing site and are linking to an email marketing company (email marketing software in this instance), you would use “Put your internet marketing on auto-pilot and use the best tool for internet marketers today – internet marketing email software. Then just use other variants to internet marketing.
10. IMG Alt Tags — Your images should be described via ALT Tags with the keywords you are optimizing for – If your image is hosted on your web-host, the file name of the images should also be SEO’d — If you have an image relating to the Armand Morin Big Seminar use Armand-Morin-Big-Seminar.jpg in your images folder.
11. Keyword Density — 8% is excellent and doesn’t seem spammy, if you have a 500 word article, then 40 of those words should have variances of the search term you are targeting, if this seems excessive, lower the keyword density down to 5% and you will only need to add 25 variances/instances of your keyword. And that’s just a start… (Keyword prominence is big, but not worth a discussion).
12. Lastly and surprisingly, Your HTML comments should have your SEO terms in them (!) — As a question to the relevancy this has to your ranking, I am unsure, but most of the large sites have html comments connected to their search terms. If you end up doing an analysis of your on-page content, you can find out if the high ranked sites for your keyword use HTML comments tagged to the keyword(s) being targeted.

Imagine the results when you are capable of having your pages SEO’d to the point of perfection with inbound, highly authoritative links from relevant sites coming to your “perfected” article. After this on-page optimization is complete and your articles or blog posts are written in a “viral”/quality-like way, the best course of action is creating backlinks.

When your website is ranked well in the most popular search engines, you get more visitors clicking on your site. The more visitors you get the more business you get. Did you know that about 20 percent to 80 percent of your visitors will find your web site through the search engines.

Studies show that most people do not look past the fourth page of results. There was a time when you could use free submission services that would submit your website to search engines and directories. At one time, that would actually get you ranked OK. Nowadays, that won’t do anything for you. You want to get ranked at LEAST on the first page of Google and Yahoo. The better option would be to get ranked in the top 3 listings of both Google and Yahoo. This isn’t easy.

All search engines spider or crawl the Web and automatically index your web site based on their own secretive algorithms, which are constantly changing. How do you get ranked well. You can use pay-per-click, which is where you bid for top ranking positions under keywords of your choice. Just make sure that the bids you make are not more than what each customer is worth to you in your site. For ex, if your maximum bid per click is $10.00 and it takes 100 visitors to make a sale, you are probably going to lose money.

To get high ranked, you need to have a website with fresh content, that has well-crafted and interwoven keywords and meta data and good links to other sites with high page ranking. You could have an rss feed in your site so that the content is fresh (although it is considered duplicate content and won’t in itself rank well) and new articles are submitted to keep the customers interested and the search engines satisfied.

Search engines are looking for fresh information, good linking, and relevance. Keep these points in mind and set forth with that high ranked site.

The currency of SEO is relevancy – for example your keyword in your domain name and relavant good content and BACKLINKS – lots of them.

This will be discussed further in posts under ‘SEO’ and ‘Keywords’ categories.