Everyone now pretty much agrees: SEO is a required process the same way debugging is a process for developers or spell checking for anyone writing.

With that in mind lets look at the A-B-C of on page search engine optimization.

Top on page SEO factors

Domain name and age:

The best is to have your domain name relating to your site’s topic plus an older domain name is better than a younger one.

Title tag:

Your page title tag needs to describe your page theme well and be unique on every page. That’s the simplest so lets not stay on this one longer.

H1 tag (or first page headline):

The H1 tag is very often a forgotten or at least an element not handled too well. Laziness and/or lack of understanding about it’s function very often leads it to be left aside or badly used and simply creating more noise than signal for the search engines.

Lets start by making something clear. The H1 tag is still an important factor for search engine. Maybe the other H tags no longer play an important factor but the H1 still does.

So what’s the role of the the H1 tag?

It’s an important reinforcing signal for search engines. As a stand alone element it won’t bring you up the SERP but done well in conjunction with the other on page element (title, description, theme and links) it’ll improve your SERP ranking every time. So why not take 2 minutes and put all the chances on your side?

Okay, so what should we do with H1 tags?

1- You need to have just 1 H1 tag per page, be unique and be present on every page.

Quick note: This is often a problem on home page with blogs. The various blog posts’ title each have their own H1 tag on the home page. The post title should only be wrapped in the H1 tag on the post page. Not the home page.

2- The H1 tag should provide the page description , be concise, short and catchy.

3- The H1 tag needs to be the first header tag. Don’t put your other H tags before your H1.

4- The H1 tag should have the target keyword describing the page topic or theme.

Doing the 4 things described above is important because if you don’t you’ll give free rein to the search engines to determine your page most important topic.

But what if you don’t do it well or don’t follow the same rules on every page? That will provide markup noise to the search engines and they’ll not follow your guidance. Instead they’ll try to come up with their own understanding (good or bad) about the topical meaning of your page.

So, make search engines’ jobs (and yours) easier and provide them with clear and consistent H1 markup across all your pages.

Description tag:

Each page’s description tag (also knew as meta description tag) need to be unique to the page. It also needs to describe the page theme well while at the same time using the most important keywords used in the page’s tittle, H1 tag and the page’s theme. These elements are important to help describe the page to search engines in conjunction with the other factors described here.

The second reason why the description tag is important is that it provides you with an opportunity to use some messaging in the SERP. In other word the meta description is displayed in the SERP with, in general, 2 lines of text.

Why not using these 2 lines of text to provide a message that will get people to click your links’ result on the SERP and arrive on your site? Search engines provide you with free advertising on their page so why not use it effectively!

Topic and quality of page and sites you link to:

These factors are a bit more fuzzy. But time and time again sites linking to sites within the same topical family are rewarded with extra trust from the search engines. So following these 2 simple broad principals and they should help you get better on the SERPs:

1- Have the majority of your pages link to sites and pages within the topical family. We’re saying the majority, you don’t need to have 100% of your links going to www.fdic.gov if your bank.

2- Link to pages and sites that are considered authorities in their topics. This send a signal to search engines that you know what you are talking about and doing. In other words, that you can be trusted.

Keywords used in page content:

This has been fairly well covered on many seo blogs in the past so lets simply say that you should idealy have the most important keywords for your page present in the page’s text.

Also be certain keyword density doens’t play a real factor for big site. But if you have a small blog it may be important to, at least, not go the other way and use keywords’ stuffing.

Simply focus on writing quality content for each page.

Anchor text of links pointing to your page:

You naturally don’t have control over the links from other sites but you can control the links anchor text from within your site to your page.

These anchor text links must decribe well the page they’re linking to within your site.

How does this help? It reinforce the meaning of the page (keywords, topic, theme) to search engines.

So go ahead and tweak your on page seo factors. If you don’t have the patience to do it you can hire someone to do it for you. You’ll get a easy ROI by doing it.

What if you don’t do it? Other bigger, better sites, already do it. So if you don’t do it you’re setting yourself to compete with one hand tied behind your back.

Question or comment? We’re happy to hear from you!