Internet Marketing
SEO GUIDE

Introduction To On-Page SEO

Description: Everyone has heard of SEO, but what exactly is on-page SEO? Learning what it's all about can help you to build a more search engine friendly website.

There are many different aspects of search engine optimization to consider when you are creating and building your website, but one of the most important is on-page SEO. This quite simply describes anything which relates to what goes on your actual web pages; in other words, on-page SEO techniques relate to the content of your website - the words in particular.

On-page search engine optimization is quite easy to understand and put into practice, and if you are ever in doubt as to whether a particular technique is on page or not, all you need to do is ask yourself whether that technique relates to the actual content of the page. If it has anything to do with titles, web copy, the appearance of that web page or keywords, then it can safely be categorized as an on-page SEO technique.

While these techniques are relatively easy to pick up, you should work on improving your knowledge of them over time, because it will help to get your site ranked more highly and attract more visitors as a result.

One of the most important aspects of on-page SEO that's worth remembering is that the first section of the content on each and every page of your website carries extra weight. That is, it can make or break the page as a whole. Anyone who is a writer will know how important titles are in the overall scheme of things; if you don't have a good title the reader might not even bother to see what the rest of the article is about.

This is just as relevant to writing copy for your website as it is to anywhere else - perhaps even more so in fact. Not only do you have to please your visitors, you also have to please the search engines that will be looking at your content and ranking you according to how good and relevant it is. Make no mistake, if you don't get off to a good start on every single page of your website you may well notice the difference when it comes to checking your rankings.

Assuming you have already figured out which keywords are advisable to use on each individual page, you should ensure that the most relevant one is included within the title itself. Think of the title tag as the equivalent of waving a colored flag that the search engine robots will see and come to investigate. If you have a dull and uninteresting title and you haven't included any keywords or even attempted anything like a description to entice both visitors and robots to come and see what's going on, then you won't get a very good result in the search engines.

Next comes the rest of the content. If you have ever come across a web page that is basically one long unbroken paragraph you'll know what a huge turn off this is. Fortunately this is very easy to solve with the help of a little html knowledge.

Many people are put off by the thought of having to learn some html, but in reality it's not so difficult to learn the basics that go to make up a well presented article that looks good on the page.

Including headings within your article help to break it up to a degree, and the use of html tags to make this happen also attracts the attention of the robots that are crawling your site to see what's there. The presence of a tag of some kind helps to indicate that there's something worth looking at there, so if you can legitimately include a long tail keyword within that heading that relates to the subject of the page then by all means do so.

It's also worth exploring the concept of using meta tags to help the search engines evaluate the content of your site. These don't need to be created to please your visitors, since they won't be able to see them, but instead your keyword tag should contain your keywords for that page, and the title tag should contain the title for that page. As you can see, even html tags are reasonably straightforward once you start finding out more about them.

It's a good idea to tackle one element at a time when you start creating your web pages. Bookmark any useful websites that give out basic html guidance and advice, and you'll soon get the hang of how and where to use the tags to your best advantage.

The main point to make about on-page search engine optimization is that it all boils down to having outstanding, in depth and comprehensive content. If you've got that, then you have a good strong base from which to start.