When thinking of SEO, many people are fixated on link building and optimization outside of the website. In actuality, the most important aspect of SEO starts on the webpage itself. Before any onsite SEO is considered, an important fact that needs to be acknowledged is that SEO is about individual web pages as well as entire websites. Every page is considered separate to every search engine. Therefore, it is important that each page receives equal attention when attempting to attain high ranking.
The first well known optimization strategy is key word density. Many search engine optimization specialists believe that there is importance placed on how many times a certain key phrase is sprinkled throughout a page of text. This aspect is important enough to become a sort of science in which a specific percentage of anywhere from 3 – 20% of the text must be the key phrase itself. Of course there are now real methods of knowing what the perfect amount is and logic in the idea that the key phrase must be placed a few times in the text to be considered relevant in the eyes of the search engines.
The next onsite optimization strategy is title tags and H1 tags. These are huge indicators of what a web page is about to a search engine. This of course is not the only factor; in fact, if this was the only strategy used on a web page with nonsense written, the page would not rank well at all. Along with a well optimized text with high key word density, creating titles containing the key phrases you want to optimize for will increase your page’s rank. Linking to other related websites is a logical and proven onsite SEO strategy. Not only do search engines recognize the topic of the websites pointing links to your site, they also know the topic of the websites you are linking out to. If these websites are not related to your website, it’s obvious that it will hurt ranking and it is well documented. When linking out to other websites, make sure to do so in moderation and use proper anchor text. Having links pointing to relevant websites is not as effective as having them link to you, but is a good indication to search engines that the topic of your website is relevant for a key word phrase.
Finally, make sure to add content to your site on a regular basis. Those who add a few pages to their website every day for a year will see huge success in their little 300 or so page website. If one adds 300 pages to a website once, they will never again watch their once popular site loose visitors due to stagnancy. Search engines will send traffic to a site that is not updated, but only for key phrases that are unpopular and not really worth ranking well for. Earlier it was mentioned that the web page is separate from the web site when it comes to many aspects, but that is not the entire case. The website is considered a whole in many aspects and updated content is one of the large indications that search engines do consider the website as a whole.
