If you are the Do It Yourself type you’ll be interested in what Top 5 On Page factors affect your search engine rankings.

On Page optimization includes anything directly in your html that you can change to boost your search engine rankings.

The Top 5 On Page SEO Factors

Title Tag

Your title tags are super important and the easiest to change. The titles of your web pages appear in the search engine rankings. They are what people searching see first are a large part of where the Search Engines rank your site.

Titles should be an exact keyword or phrase people use to search for. If you match this up perfectly your chances for ranking for that phrase are better then say if you water your titles down, filling them up with related keywords in hopes of showing up for multiple keywords for the same page. Stay Focused!

Your titles should be different for every single webpage. Every page should be laser targeted to one keyword or key phrase.

H Tags

H tags are those that separate your content into a hierarchical structure. The h1 tag is the most important. It’s basically your headline tag. Just like your title tag it tells the search engines what your page is about. Again it should include a keyword/keyphrase that is searched by people every day. Don’t just guess.

Then you can consider every other H tag to be your subheadlines. This is how your content should be set up.

Title – <– this is the title or headline of your page. It uses the h1 tag
Intro paragraph(s) <– this is where you introduce your article, draw people in etc.
Subheading <– go further into detail, this is your subheadline. It uses the h2 tag
Sub paragraph
H3 tag
Sub paragraph
H4 tag
etc.

Quality Content! (Then Keyword Density)

Your copy counts! Don’t fill it up with keywords just to rank higher in the SERPS! Write good copy and you’re visitors will thank you. If you’re writing about an exact topic your copy should be filled with supporting keywords, enough that your page does not have to be checked for keyword density.

If you do want to write search engine optimized copy then sprinkle the keyword you are optimizing for throughout your page. It’s ok to vary it up. The keyword “seo web design” can easily be replaced with “web design and seo” and you’re safe. Or even mentioning them separetly is good.

It should be in the Title of the page, the H1 tag, mentioned in the first paragraph and possible used in an h2 or h3 tag, then mentioned in the last paragraph.

Link Structure

This is about how you link your pages together. It’s the same as site structure and includes “deep linking” or linking to sub pages of your site.

Your website should be separated into sections (if you’re content warrants it) or categories, or tags, or silos. Whatever you want to call it you basically want to break your content down into related sections.

Each main section is linked from every single page, and the sub pages are linked together only by each other. If you want to increase the inner links to a page then you can put a link to that page from every page. This will boost the backlinks to that page and thus boost it’s rankings in the SERPS. Yes, your own pages count towards your subpages backlinks.

When you link to your subpages you should use link text that uses keywords that best describe that page. If possible you should use the pages exact title (if it’s optimized) as the link text. So if you have a page titled “affordable web hosting, Los Angeles” any links pointing to that page should have the link text “affordable web hosting, LA” or “LA web hosting” or some variation using the same keywords.

Never use generic link text!

Tags, Tags, Tags

(alt, <strong>, <em>, )

Using proper tags in your html is something you have to do. It helps with making your site accessible, more readable and it’s simply required if you want to rank on the first page of any search engine.

Alt tag <– the text that appears when your image is hovered over or is missing. It helps both visitors and search engines tell what your image is about. You can use long descriptions in your alt tags. It’s also good to use your pages main keyword somewhere in the tag.

<strong> The bold tag should be used when necessary, not just to highlight keywords. Use it right and you can help your readers pull out text from your copy and also support what your page is about. The underline and italic tag should be used in the same way.

Of course there are more then 5 rules to follow!

The 5 things mentioned above are the most important but there are others that can affect your rankings. Such as:

Meta Description – When search engines spider your site, they will either grab your meta description or the first couple sentences of your content to use in their result pages. You can control your meta tags easily and make them focused by optimizing them. Use them to control what searchers see in the serps. They should grab people’s attention! Think of your description as a sub headline.

HTML or CSS – CSS is just plain better to use. It separates your content from your design, meaning there is far less code on your pages, meaning your content is easier to spider. If you’re site isn’t using a completely CSS based layout you are probably losing in search to others that do.

Use of Javascript or Flash – If you are using fancy javascript menus, flash movies and other dynamic content you’re basically hiding your media from the search engines. If you do use dynamic content be sure to describe it with plain text on the page. If you have a photo slideshow displaying housing in Florida you should describe it exactly under the media. This way the search engines know what you are displaying.

So that’s a quick run down of the top 5 On-page seo factors. They are all things you can tweak on your pages to help them rank higher in the serps. A lot of SEO is testing and you should be testing. One simple change can bump you from page 3 to page 1 in a month. I’ve had it happen to me and it pays to test.