On-Page SEO: The Three Things That Really Matter

In my previous post, i covered the key things you can do off-page, to improve your site's rankings on the Google search results. In this post, i'll mention what you ought to do or have on your page in order to hit page 1.

On-Page SEO

Compared to off-page SEO, there's a lot more things you can do here to boost your site. The common theme running through all of them is repeating your keyword or phrase where it counts.

Page Title and URL

If there's a key term that you'd like to rank for, you should include it in your page's URL as well as the page title. This is probably the most important on-page SEO that you should do. It's not impossible to rank without having the keywords here, but it will be very hard.

Page Description

Your page description is shown as part of the search results and you should always have this filled. Otherwise, Google will pick up the first 230 characters or so. Having an eye-catching page description will also improve your clickthrough rates, so it's important you get a good one done that incorporates the keywords you want to rank for as well.

Article Length and Keyword Density

For whatever reason, Google has decided that longer articles tend to be better. Personally, i prefer articles that just get to the point and help me answer the question i have, but that's not the way Google works.

The recommended minimum is 500 words but i usually get good results when i stretch my articles into the two to three thousand word range.

Keyword density is something that no one really knows what the optimal is. Based on what has worked for me, keep it in the 2 - 4 % range and write naturally. The last thing you'd want is to stuff the keyword / phrase where it doesn't belong.

Honorable Mentions

As with off-page SEO, there are a lot of minor details that can be tweaked as you fight your way or to stay at the top. Here are some of them:

• Alt-tags for your images
• Optimized images for size
• Having related keywords or content in your article
• Proper header structure

Again, SEO is mainly common sense once you know the rules. The good thing about on-page SEO is that everything is within your control.