In today’s video Derek Armson from apd-marketing provides a quick tutorial on the basics of on page SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). The very first task is to decide on a keyword phrase for your webpage. You really want to make it just one keyword phrase. It’ll be much easier to optimise your webpage for one keyword. And don’t forget, it’s a different keyword for each page. Google displays webpages, not websites, based on the keyword phrase the surfer types into the search box.
Your keyword should be in the title tag. That’s the description in the tab at the top of your browser window. Your keyword must also be in your content headline and be surrounded by ‘h1′ or ‘h2′ html tags. Your images can have a description. This is called an ‘alt’ description and should include the keyword too. Derek’s last tip is to ensure your keyword appears in your content several times. 3-5% keyword density is about right; that’s the number of times it appears in the text as a percentage of the total word count. And you should ‘bold’ each occurence of the keyword. It helps the search engine ‘bots’ to give the word prominence.
Sharon Housley from SiteProNews has listed 13 on page SEO techniques in on page search engine optimisation. Try to get your keyword in the domain name. This can be done on the home page and blogs do this well if you configure the blog post title to be the ‘page slug’. Fill in your meta tags with your keyword. Google doesn’t use the meta tags anymore but other search engines do. And make sure your content is on a strong theme with outgoing links to websites that are also based on the same theme or topic.
I think it’s best to keep it simple. Decide to apply 4 to 6 tips, at most, to each page and ensure you add them to every page you build. Don’t spend too long doing this. It’s not worth the time spent. But it is worth getting your on page SEO done for each of your webpages. Do it consistently and you will soon see your pages appearing on google searches.
