subject: Best Guide To Doing On Page Seo [print this page] If you want your website to start dominating the search engines for certain keywords, the first step is doing On Page SEO. The fact is that if your own website is not correctly optimised for keywords, then the effectiveness of any off page SEO will be reduced and you will just make it harder on yourself.
The Number 1 SEO Rule
The most important rule to remember about this topic is that each page of your website should be optimised for only 1 keyword. Too often, people try to optimise 1 page for many keywords but what ends up happening is that the page never ranks highly for any keyword. Its just like the idea that its better to be an expert at something rather than the jack of all trades.
So if you have a couple of keywords you want your website to target, then create a separate page for each one. Then optimise each page for the target keyword using the information below.
On Page SEO Optimisation
Ive divided up the topic into 6 small sections below. If you follow the information in all 6 parts and incorporate them into all your web pages, then you will have the most optimised website possible.
URL
You need to make sure that the URL of your page contains your target keyword. Lets say that your target keyword was beauty salon.
If your page was the home page, then the URL should be something like this: http://www.beautysalonguide.com/
If your page was a sub page, then the URL should be something like this: http://www.howtodressup.com/beauty-salon-tips
As you can see, the target keyword is part of the URL. The general rule is that the further to the left your keyword is in the URL, the higher it will rank in the search engines.
Title Tag
This is what appears at the top of your browser when you visit a web page. To do On Page SEO correctly, you want your keyword to appear here. Using the previous example, if you had a web page targeting the keyword beauty salon, then you should have something like Beauty Salon Tips in the title tag.
Meta Description
This is what appears on search engine listings underneath the title tag of your website. This typically occupies 2 lines and its purpose is to describe your website in an enticing and compelling way to get people to click through. Nevertheless, often people forget to add their target keyword here. That doesnt mean that it should be stuffed with keywords. It should both keyword-rich and descriptive.
Keep it to 15-20 words because any more will probably get cut off by the search engines. A sneaky tip is to place the target keyword right at the beginning or right at the end.
Meta Tags
This is where you can put in the keyword or keywords you want your page to target. This is a way for you to tell the search engines which keywords you want the page to rank highly for. However, once again, dont stuff it with keywords. Keep it to a maximum of 10 keywords.
Keyword Density
This refers to the percentage of words on a page that comprises your keyword. If you want to improve website ranking for a certain keyword, then by mentioning a couple of times on the page helps a lot. However, dont fall into the trap of making every second word your keyword.
Aim for a keyword density of 3%. Dont go higher than this otherwise the SEO benefit will be reduced. So, for example, if your page is 500 words long, dont mention your keyword more than 15 times.
Media
Finally, adding images, audio and video to your web page boosts its rankings in the search engines. Its no secret that search engines such as Google love media and rewards those who do. When you do add an image, audio or video, make sure that its title includes the target keyword of your page.
This post describes On Page SEO in a nutshell. This article covers everything you need to know about On Page SEO, which means that you don't have to read anything else on the topic.