Dear Readers,

In my first article on Search Engine Optimization basics (SEO) I wrote about keywords. Today I want to write about the basic things you do on your web pages to help with rankings.

If a ranking in the search engines is scored on a scale of say 1 to 100… in the past the content of your web page might make up the majority of your ranking score. It might make 60 points or 70 points of your overall ranking. Now days it plays a very small part. It does still play a part but maybe it makes up 10 or 20% of the score.

(I am sure some of my SEO friends could give you more details about this. I’m good, but not great at it. I don’t research SEO every day If you want percentages and numbers try some of these experts Matt Cutts, Aaron Wall, or Greg Boser.)

We call “on page factors” the items and changes you can make to your web page that effect the ranking. These are the changes you can make to the page content, the HTML, etc.

For example in the early days of the internet one of the most important factors was the META tags in your HTML. These META tags started with basics like “keywords” and a “description” of your web site. You would put in a list of all your keywords and a short description of the content of your web site. By placing  your keywords in there the search engines would know what your web site is about.

You would also put keywords into your pages. The keyword might appear in the title, in the header, in links, etc. For each of these occurrences you might get some additional benefit (or in the example above your score would increase.)

The problem with all of this was that people began to figure out how the search engines worked. They would put together theories. They would setup test sites to try and rank for certain keywords. They would analyze competitors sites. They would then setup fake pages just to trick the search engines and get good rankings.

Now days these on page factors do not mean as much as they once did. For example Google doesn’t use the META keywords tag any more at least not in determining how high your site ranks for a keyword.

In the next episode I’ll tell you more about how Google and other search engines determine how to rank your site. For now if you want to focus on your web pages here are a few things to check.

• Does the title of your web site include the keyword phrase? Does the keyword phrase come at the beginning of the title?
• Does the keyword phrase appear in any of the headers, links, bold text, alt text, etc. on the page?
• Does the keyword phrase appear too often? Are you forcing it to fit? (This is what search engine spammers used to do. They would use the keyword repeatedly even if it didn’t make sense.)
• Is the content of your page updated frequently?
• Is the content of your page unique to your web site or is it a duplicate if another page or site?

Again these are just a few on page factors. There are so many possible factors (not mentioned above) and they may have an impact on a site that is very competitive.  However for most of you these factors will have a negligible impact. You want to cover the basics but you don’t have to become an expert to get good rankings on long tail keywords.

You don’t have to optimize everything if you are going for longer keyword phrases instead of very competitive “short” phrases. You only need to optimize everything if you are going against very competitive keywords. For example if you look up a competitive keyword like “cell phones” there will be a lot of competition.  That keyword phrase will have a lot of people who are SEO experts competing on these terms.  These are very competitive industries that pay affiliates well and attract a lot of SEO people who design sites specifically to get high rankings.  In these industries you’d need to pay attention to every detail to be competitive.

If you were to really become an expert at this you’d pay attention to other factors like: unique ip addresses, domain names, file names, image file names, whether your page loads fast, how high up in the content the keyword appears, other alternate meta tags, etc.  I mean we could probably make a list of 50 factors on your web site that might effect your rankings.  However for most of you reading this you’ll just need to focus on the basics of including your keyword phrase in the title, including it in the content, using links that include the phrase, etc.  These are the items that will have the greatest impact on your site’s rankings.

Next week I’ll talk about something even more important.  I’ll talk about something that has become the most critical in getting good search engine rankings.

Check back next week for more (was that a good teaser?)

- Ben Fitts

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MLM Training > Home Business Blogs > SEO Basics Part 2 – How Elements on Your Web Page Help with Rankings