Everything You Need To Know About On Page SEO

I've seen some pretty bizarre advice and rumors floating around about what it takes to rank on the search engines and how your page should be setup. I'm going to give you my personal experience of what a properly setup page would have:

1) Quality Content - Not some spun or dirt poor garbage quality content that'll produce a high bounce rate.

2) Researched Keywords - Keywords that are relevant to what you're selling or the service you're providing. Randomly targeting keywords is like spamming people asking them to buy something, your conversion rate will be low.

3) Titles - Your pages should have appropriate and relevant keywords as the title inside the HTML.

4) Meta - Your meta description and keywords should give an accurate and relevant description of your page to let the search engines know what your page is about.

5) Headings/Headers - You don't need to go nuts with 10 H1/H2 tags like some people have suggested, but you need to have at least one H1 or Header that tells the search engines what the page is about. This should be a keyword.

6) Site Speed - Google wants people to be able to load websites as quickly as possible, check for clutter that may be slowing your website down.

7) URLs - I've seen a lot of people who say "YOUR KEYWORD MUST BE IN THE URL TO RANK!" and they sincerely live by it. It doesn't have to be... it doesn't hurt if you have or don't have them in the URL. As a general rule, try to keep your URL short and to the point.

8) Keyword Diversity - Try not to put your keywords too close to each other, it doesn't read well when you have 4 keywords side by side.

9) Keyword Density - I've seen so many people argue about what percent works for them. As a general rule, just try to stay under 4% and stop trying to go for some magical number that's supposedly going to rank you better than other percents. It's not 2006 anymore, there's no general set of numbers that'll rank you over other people.

Corey