On-Site SEO Tactics – An 11 Question Report Card

Link building, blog commenting, social bookmarking, forum participation and tagging for external meta data are all well known tactics for off-site search engine optimization.  One should not forget the world of on-site seo tactics to improve rankings for your site’s web pages.

There are several on-site SEO tactics that we can use to optimize site pages which in turn may result in higher rankings.  Below is a simple report card to help you pass / fail yourself on any of your web-pages.  Keep in mind these 12 questions as you build new pages and posts.

Are you ready to take the On-Site SEO tactics test?:

  1. Do Your Meta & Description Tags contain your keywords? — This is what Google uses to display in it’s search results so make sure you have the keyword(s) you are targeting is each of these sections.
  2. Does The Title Tag contain your keyword(s)? – The SINGLE important element of on-page SEO, trust us on this one.
  3. Are some of your main keyword(s) BOLDED? This helps search engines understand the significance of the keyword(s).
  4. Does the first sentence in the body text and the first words used per sentence contain your keyword(s)? Make sure that it’s suitable for human reading as the primary objective is provide good quality content for humans NOT robots.  The words used in the first sentence are most important due to the implementation of Google’s LSI algorithm.
  5. Is Your URL SEO’d? — The subdirectory folder and page of content should be SEO’d (i.e. http://domain.com/SEO/onsite-seo-tactics.com would fetch a high ranking for a page dedicated to SEO tactics – especially if there are several highly authoritative, relevant, deep in-bound links.
  6. Do Your H1 and H2 Texts Contain Your Keyword(s)? The headings show the search engine the main subjects and Table of Contents for the content to be indexed. Make these keyword friendly and reflective of your page’s title tag.
  7. Do You Have Same Site Link Texts? — The links connecting the pages of your site together must have your targeted keyword terms in them as well as all links throughout the site — even though it seems excessive, having variations to your targeted keywords would also help when linking out to other pages within your site.
  8. Are Your Same-Site Link URLs SEO’d? — Your keyword(s) should be used to describe the pages within your site.  In addition to this, the URLs you link to must have SEO URLs (eg: http://domain.com/your-keyword.html)
  9. Your Outbound Link Text are they SEO’d? — External resources you link to must be SEO’d – If you are an internet marketing site and are linking to a hosting company (hosting company in this instance), you would use “Put your internet marketing on a cost effective hosting company the best hosting company for internet marketers today – internet marketing hosting company. Then just use other variants to internet marketing.
  10. Do Your Images contain IMG Alt Tags? — Your images should be described via ALT Tags with the keywords you are optimizing for – If your image is hosted on your web-host, the file name of the images should also be SEO’d — If you have an image about Sony TVs have it be Sony-tvs.jpg in your images folder.
  11. Do Your Keywords Appear Often Enough? The term for this is keyword density— 8% is a good target to shoot for and will not seem spammish.  For example, if you have a 500 word article, then 40 of those words should have variances of the search term you are targeting, if this seems excessive, lower the keyword density down to 5% and you will only need to add 25 variances/instances of your keyword.

You see success in anything is dependent upon great systems.  Now you have a decent simple system for on-site seo and hopefully you will see improved traffic results.  If you want to get a little more in depth on SEO check out Google’s very own Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.  The next course of action is building as many links as possible.  A good blog post on link building techniques.