The importance of on page optimization is one of the most overlooked areas of website development and SEO. Most people think it’s just the meta tags and “keyword density” that matters. If this was the case then everybody that has read up on SEO in a forum or two would be ranking fine. Obviously this is not the case.

On-page SEO is about the overall page topic and reputation. There are many different variables that come in to play when a robot decides what the page topic and reputation is. We infer things robots can’t ….yet. The programmers at Google are amazing! Anyway. All the basics are included – Meta tags, keyword density, H tags etc but it’s the combination of these factors that’s critical. I’ve gotten sites in unsophisticated niches top 3 rankings with 5 relevant links because the on-page optimization was done right. The most common mistake people make is looking at their site from a persons perspective, typically their own. When we look at something we can infer what that site is about very easily. A simple h1 tag at the top and a few images is all we as people need to figure it out. That is not the case with robots. Robots look at the whole page and I do mean whole page. The HTML, javascript, everything when they are digging through a site trying to figure out what it’s about. All it can do is comparisons.

One of the reasons content is king with Google is that it makes the webpage easy to classify. A page with lots of images and little text is very hard to classify. Think about it theres nothing there use for comparison and indexing. We can see the pictures but the spider can’t.

Here are some basic guidelines that will help wtih your on-page SEO efforts

1. Keep your title tag short and to the point. The more phrases or words you have up there the harder you’ll have to work to get ranked for any of them. The title tag is what you need to base the content of your page on.
2. If a phrase is in the title tag include it in your meta description and keyword tags and not a bunch of times either. Once in the keyword tag and once or the description. Twice if it gets the point across to your potential visitors in the SERP’s and doesn’t put them off. Once is better though.
3. Have the phrase you used in your title tag in at least some type of header tag – h1 – h6. A great way to include it is to have the title tag phrase in one H tag and then break it up and include the individual words in the other header tags, assuming your site design wont look squirrely by having several H tags.
4. Include variations of your chosen keyword or phrase in your content. Constantly repeating the same phrase throughout the page isn’t very readable and can be interpreted as spam. Use these variations naturally. English is a very expressive language so put it to good use and make the content interesting and readable. As an example if you have chosen brushes write about hair brushes, paint brushes, scrub brushes and the like. Hair, paint and scrub are all words that we naturally associate with brushes. Keep the variations & associations natural and real. Good, usable and readable content will take you much further in Google
5. Include the keyword or phrase in bullet points if your site design allows it. Bullet points add emphasis to the items in them. Also keep in mind that the typical website visitor scans rather than reads page content. Bullet points give them quick ways to see what your site is about and this is key!
   Create more text content on your page than the text in the links leaving your page. Lets say that you have 20 links on your page and most of them are 2 words a piece. So you have 40 words in your link text. If you double that number – 80 – that is the bare minimum amount of text content you should have on your page. Remember the text in the outgoing links is also included in the overall picture the spider is getting of your page.
6. Make sure your images have alt tags. Do NOT spam your keyphrase there. Put exactly what the image is about that way you can be found in google image searches as well. If you keep the pictures on your webpage relevant to your topic it will only enhance your optimization efforts.
7. Proper SEO starts on the page itself. If your page topic is off your link building efforts will go to waste because the link pointing to your site isn’t relevant and accurate. The more completely everything agrees the easier it is to rank

By keeping your site readable and and designed for your visitors you’ll do much better in the serps overall