1. Body Copy/Text

   Everything is tied in together so make sure that the body is relevant to the title and the description tags. Make sure you also put your keywords here, however do not over do it and make sure that the text is still readable by a human. Your keywords should add up to not more than 20% of your body copy. The percentage is only by testing. Each topic has it’s threshold. For instance on a Poker Related Website more than 15% is most likely to be considered spam, this is only from experience and I have no other sources to justify it.Other things worth mentioning from experience is, I never saw a difference between using <strong> and using <b> for bold.

   Proximity and Prominence also plays an important part. The closer the key phrase is to the left, the better it is.

2. Headings

   Heading tags (H1 through to H6) are given more weight by search engines than regular body copy. So they should be used wisely to reinforce the page’s overall keyword theme. For instance do not put your blog post date within an H1 tag, because you’re NOT trying to rank in the search engines for a date. My tip is use only 1 <H1> Tag per page, this will make it easier for search engines to understand the theme of the page.

3. Avoiding Canonicalisation Errors of your URL

   You may be hurting your ranking abilities without even knowing it. Canonicalisation errors occurs when a website is able to be accessed via both www.website.com and website.com, in severe cases this can cause the search engines to effectively index 2 identical copies of your site. Worse than that would be if you use also linked to the home page in different combinations throughout your website:

   • www.website.com
   • website.com
   • website.com/index.html

   DO use different anchor text for the same page.
   DON’T use different URLs for the same page.

4. Validate Your Code and Feeds

   I Use http://validator.w3.org/ for to validate my websites and http://feedvalidator.org/ for my Feeds (RSS1,RSS2 and Atom) to make they are crawlable by spiders. Spiders have become highly efficient in assessing code and can get by certain html errors, however cleaner code make happier spiders and happier spiders give us better rankings.

5. XML Sitemaps

   XML sitemaps are a way of communicating to Google and other search engines the page structure of your site, how often page content is updated, and when new content is added to the site.

   Using an XML sitemap will help ensure:
   1.) All site pages are crawled and indexed.
   2.) Frequently-updated site pages are crawled more often.
   3.) New site pages are quickly indexed.

   You can create your Xml Sitemap http://www.xml-sitemaps.com

6. Good Fresh Content

   In my experience is that pages you update frequently are crawled more frequently by bots, especially Googlebot. This is especially true for new websites. This is because a new website usually don’t have a lot of trust and links pointing to it, therefore there are a few other ways for Google to know that your website has been updated.

As you might have figured out, following these points is not just about good SEO, it’s about good website design and development. There are websites who rank without having any SEOs working on them just because of this factor, however if you have a good website and you know Search Engine Optimization, than you will most definately have more edge over your competitors.

This is part 1 of 4 pages and skims through important On Page Factors of SEO. Each point can take up a post on it’s own and I’d be happy to discuss any point in further detail. More so I would like to hear your opinions and experiences on the topics.

Tagged as: SEO, seo on-page factors, Seo Tutorial