Basics of On Page SEO

The most important aspect of a website vis-à-vis SEO is to have quality content. It is often said that in SEO content is king. One should always create a website to the users and not for the search engines. If you are creating the website for the users then there are greater chances of those getting higher ranks in the search engines. Writing good content has to be supported by finding out the right keywords for the website. So the first process in On Page SEO is Keyword Research.

Keyword Research
Keyword research is perhaps the most fundamental part of a Search Engine Optimization campaign. If the website is targeting the wrong keyword then driving traffic to the website is going to be very difficult. So identifying the keyword is a process which involves a lot of effort in it. There are a lot of keyword research tool available online like Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, Nichebot, Overture etc. Once you identify the right keywords then the effort should be directed against finding the best possible ways to integrate these keywords into the copy of the website. These keywords should find it place in the content of the website, title tags, meta tags, meta description, and title of the content.

Title Tags and Meta Tags
The keywords should find their place in the title tags and the meta tags of the webpage. Title tag is the content which the web browser displays at the top of the browser when some page is downloaded. Title tag is perhaps the most important place where one has to integrate the keywords into as search engines tend to give enormous importance to this aspect of a webpage. Meta tag is the HTML tag which contains information on the content of the website and is not visible to the users and is used to give information to the search engines about the specific webpage. So it is quite imperative to have the keywords as the meta tags. The keywords in the title tag and in the meta tags will go a long way in enhancing the value of a webpage in the eyes of the search engines.

Meta Description
The meta description is a hidden HTML code which the search engine uses to display the detail of a website when it shows the search results. Hence it is very important to have the keywords in the meta description of a webpage.

Headings
While using the headings in webpage always remember to include the keywords in the headings. Each search engine has different ways in which they prioritize the headings and therefore it is quite vital to use the right heading format while writing a web content.

Keyword Density
Once you have identified the right keywords to concentrate at then the next task is to write the content of the website with these keywords. One of the most important factors to consider while writing the content is the keyword density. Keyword density is the number of times a specific keyword appears in the whole content. Different search engines have different ways of analyzing the importance of a webpage on the basis of the keyword density. For the search engines, a higher number of a keyword appearances on a webpage means higher chances of appearing in the top results of the search engines.

Site Maps
Yet another important aspect of on page SEO techniques is the inclusion of site map in the website particularly in the homepage, if possible. It is useful because it helps the search engine spiders to index the whole of a website without much difficulty since it provides a page which contains only the text links to all pages of a website. Google in their "Guidelines for Webmaster" suggest that if you have more than 100 links then it is always advisable to break up the site map into logical groups.

Internal Linking
Most of the SEO efforts are directed towards getting good backlinks from other websites. A factor most website owners tend to forget is the importance of internal linking in getting higher search engine ranks. With good internal linking of the pages there are greater chances of getting indexed by the search engine spiders and it will also help the user in navigating efficiently through the website. If an internal page with a low PR gets a link from a high PR homepage then the internal page also gets some added value from the high PR homepage.

These are some of the factors that are to be taken care of while doing on page SEO. This article only gives a basic idea of on page SEO and it should be noted that there are lot of subtle things that are to be taken care of while doing on page SEO which in itself is a elaborate subject.