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Today we are going to answer the question “What is on page SEO?” and look at a broad overview of specific things you can address to improve your SERP rankings. We’re focusing on tossing as many ideas as possible about improving on page SEO factors here, and will go more in-depth in a later article.
The main thing to understand about on page SEO is that it consists of factors which you have direct control over, as a site owner. The content itself, the alt text, the images and links which appear in the pages themselves; all of these are important SEO factors, and all are under your direct control. Mostly, they involve web design elements and content issues. Such as:
- Keywords – Plenty of factors relating to on page SEO have to do with keywords, their placement, usage, and a variety of other things. The keyword should appear in the URL itself, as well as the domain name, if possible. It should appear in the title and the meta tags. It should have the appropriate occurrence rate, referred to as density, throughout the body of the text (at the time of this writing, generally held to be 1-2%) They should appear in the header tags, proximity to other keywords should be looked at, the phrase order, and possible long tail variants as well. It should appear in the alt text, and in the links to other pages, as anchor text.
- Links – Both internal and outgoing links are important. Internally, you want to have as robust a link structure as possible; the fact that you have direct control over anchor text is an added bonus. Keep all the links valid, and make sure that you have an efficient a structure as possible – no deeper than 4 clicks to get to any part of your site. For outgoing links, you want to be sure that you link only to good sites. Don’t link to farms, and don’t link to sites known for buying and selling links. Software can help with this responsibility. Also, the longer that any link stays up, the better; constantly changing links is called ‘churn’ and reflects negatively on your sites factors.
- Configuration – There are plenty of things that can be done to optimize a site around any individual keyword that are actually done at the configuration or registration level. The higher the top level domain the better, for example (.gov sites are higher status than .com.) Having a slow, quick loading page also counts, don’t get bogged down with huge files and animations. Keeping pages fresh through editing them over time helps, as well as making frequent additions to the content itself. Keeping pages thematically structured and related to one another is monitored, as well as the site size itself (with bigger being better in most cases.)
- Avoid Negative Factors – The first three points have all been positive things you can do to enhance your on page SEO factors. You also want to avoid things which cause penalties, like using cloaking, overly optimizing your site, linking to bad neighborhoods, using meta refresh tags to perform sketchy redirects, having adult or profane content on the site, excessive linking, keyword stuffing, duplicate or stolen content or imagery, the use of flash, and more are all things which should be avoided.
By learning more about the different factors involved in on page SEO, you really have the opportunity to jumpstart your own site, because almost all of these factors are something you can address yourself with just a few minutes of time. This level of control is something that most people don’t even realize they have over their own rankings, and can definitely be a great way for a small business to get a great ROI on a modest investment of time.