1. Title

Whether you are planning to optimise your website now or later, the minimum you need toknow is what are the keywords that you want to use and to include them in your content.

The general rule of thumb is that the closer to the front of the title your keywords are, the better it is. The key of keywords is that they appear in the title

When people search for something they are going to want to see the words and language that they used to be refelected back to them in the results.

You should try and keep the length of your title under 70 characters for search purposes. This will ensure that the full title is visible in a search result.

2. Meta Description

SEO is not just about the ranking. It’s also about the presentation of your content in a search engine. The meta description of your content is the brief “snippet” copy for the search result below the title. This can often be a major infulence whether or not you get the click

Try and keep the meta description under 160 characters so the full description is visible in the search result

3. Content

Different, Unique and frequently updated content can make search engines very happy. For SEO, your content should be tightly on-topic and centered ont he subject matter of the desired keyword phrases.

Its accepted that a very brief content may have a harder time ranking over a page with more substantial content. So you’ll want to have a content body length of at least 300 words.

If you want to be a bit more detailed and are very very serious about your keywords and SEO, it might aslo help to bold the first occurence of a keyword or include in in a bulleted list.

4. Keyword Frequency

Keyword frequency is the number of times your targeted keywords appear on the page. Keyword density is the ratio of those keywords to the rest of the words on the page.

It’s generally accepted that keyword frequency impacts ranking . Keyword density, as some sort of “golden” ratio, likely does not. But the only way to make sense of an appropriate frequency is via the ratio of those keywords to the rest of the content, so density is still a metric you need.

In other words, the only way to tell if your repetition of keywords is super or spammy is to measure that frequency against the overall length of the content

You don’t need to mindlessly repeat keywords to optimize. In fact, if you do, you’re likely to achieve the opposite result.

5. Page Links

Linking is the fundamental basis of the web. Search engines want to know you’re sufficiently “connected” with other pages and content, so linking out to other pages matters when it comes to search engine optimization.

Here are some “rules of thumb” for linking based on generally accepted best practices:

• Link to relevant content fairly early in the body copy
• Link to relevant pages approximately every 120 words of content
• Link to relevant interior pages of your site or other sites
• Link with naturally relevant anchor text

Again, these are guidelines related to current best practices. Don’t get hung up on rules; focus on the intent behind what search engines are looking for – quality search results for people.

Yes, there’s other stuff . . .

There are other elements as well, such as URL structure and keywords, keywords in image alt files, tags and categories, and various other methods of improving your SEO. If you focus on the five areas above, however, you’re covering the vital elements of effective on-page optimization.

What would you add as a vital on-page optimization element? Let us know in the comments.