On-page factors when talking about SEO is much more than just what words appear on your page.

Let’s discuss.

I’m going to start by going through my basic check-list that I use when looking at a new website.  This is by no-means my complete list, but it’s what I use to gauge things initially.

1. Tracking – Make sure you have some sort of tracking installed on your website.  Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are a great start.  If you do not have a way to track your progress and results, then you are essentially going to be putting in lots of hard work without any way to know if it’s paying off.  You could spend weeks continuing to optimize a specific page or keyword and never know if what you are doing pays off.

2. Spider-ability – Are your pages causing the search engine spiders any problems?  You can find out easily through the Google Webmaster Tools… install it on your website, enough said.

3. Text Links – Do you have footer links at the end of your pages that point to the main category pages on your site?  These are extremely important in helping the search engines know what you feel is important on your own site.  Why should they think it’s important if you don’t.  You want to use text links to point to the pages you want to rank, and you want those links to use your keywords right in the link itself.

4. Title Tags – Do you have your keywords in the title tag?  Great, does the title make any sense for potential customers? Stuffing a bunch of great keywords into your title tags can really help your rankings, but what if the title just under yours is far more attractive and unique.  You’ll miss out on a lot of clicks by confusing the searchers with hard to read or sloppy titles.

5. Descriptions – Do your descriptions use your keywords and have a clear call to action?  This is your chance to really entice someone to choose your link over the ones around it.  Be unique!  You’ll also want to see if the search engines use your description, or make one up by pulling content from your site.

6. Javascript and Style Sheets – Make sure your javascript and style sheets are in external files.  Having all of that extra code on your page will cause the spiders to treat your content as less relevant because it appears further down the page.

7. H1, H2, and other text styles – By including your keywords in the actual headline tags and other styled text such as bold or italics. This is always a good idea for SEO.  However, be sure that your headlines are compelling.  You don’t want people to hit the back button, so make sure you are engaging your visitors.

8. Broken Links – Search engine spiders hate to run into broken links.  The entire internet is defined by links, it’s the only way to get from one place to another.  By having broken links on your website you are in essence slapping the entire internet in the face… so don’t do it.  Check your links often and be sure to fix broken ones as soon as possible.

That’s my basic checklist for getting started with on-page SEO.  As I said before, this is not an exhaustive list.  However, implementing these basic ideas on your website can often have tremendous effects in markets that aren’t very competitive.  I’ve seen pages that simply do those steps and jump from a page 8 listing to a page 1 listing in a few weeks.

That’s all for now!

Best,

Jeff

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