When it comes to onpage SEO, it’s estimated that Google checks up to 200 onpage SEO parameters. And since Google keeps its ranking algorithms a secret, nobody really knows what these checks are or even if the estimate is anywhere near correct. But none of that matters when it comes down to it. As long as you can apply a handful of the top onpage SEO strategies, you can get your web pages to rank and draw traffic.

Choose the Right Key Phrase for Onpage SEO

If you want a web page in one of the top ten search engine positions, you need to perform your SEO on a keyword or key phrase that does not have too much competition. You don’t want to take on keywords that the big guys are throwing a lot of money at or ones that too many people are competing for. It’s not that you couldn’t get to page one for these keywords, but achieving, and maintaining, your ranking would be more difficult. First, you want to get to page one, then you want a good chance of staying there.

There is one method of analyzing key phrases that is not foolproof but may give you an edge. Choose keywords and key phrases that match the following criteria::

1. Find key phrases that get more than 1000 searches per month on Google. You can check this using the Google keyword tool.

2. Go to the Google search page and search on your key phrase with the word ‘allintitle:’ in front of it (remember to include the colon). So for the key phrase of ‘yoga poses’ you would use the following search command: allintitle: yoga poses.

3. When the search is entered, look at the top of the Google search screen to see how many pages are returned for that search. The number of pages must be less than 100,000.

This method of keyword analysis is simple and free but suffers from one major drawback. It assesses the competition by finding the number of pages that the search finds. This gives a guideline to the amount of competition for that search term but doesn’t give any indication of the strength of the competition. I don’t know of a simple free way to do that, but there are tools available that can provide that information for a reasonable cost.

Seven Onpage SEO Techniques

Once you have chosen the key phrase that you want your page to rank for, you need to apply some onpage SEO techniques to it. The search engines will look for the pages that best match the search term that the user enters. Hence the need for 1000 searches a month or more. It’s no good optimizing for a search term that nobody searches on. Once you know that a fair number of people are searching for your chosen key phrase, you need to make sure your web page makes good use of that key phrase. Here are seven onpage SEO techniques you can use to make sure the search engines take notice of your page for that search term.

1. Buy a domain name that matches your key phrase. For example, if your key phrase is ‘yoga poses’, the ideal domain name would be yogaposes.com. If you can’t get an exact match, try using hyphens to separate words or add a word as a suffix such as yogaposesexplained.com. You could add a prefix word but suffix words tend to rank better with the search engines.

2. Get your key phrase into the URL of the page. This is already taken care of if your key phrase is in the domain name but you can perform onpage SEO on sub-pages as well. So for instance you might have a URL like yourdomain.com/yoga-poses.

3. Make sure the keyword appears in the title of the web page and in the meta keywords tag. If you don’t know what this means, you need to make sure your web developer understands your requirement for this. The keywords tag is not as important as it used to be, but it’s still worth using as part of your onpage SEO strategy.

4. Put your keyword into headings. If you can place your keyword into heading text such as heading 1, heading 2, etc, this will highlight it for the search engines. Ideally get your keyword into level 1, level 2 and level 3 headers.

5. Make the keyword stand out. Identify your keyword to search engines by putting it in bold, underline or italic. Search engines regard words with special formatting as important.

6. If you have an image on your web page, put your keyword into the ‘alt’ tag of the image. If you don’t have an image on your web page, it might be worth finding a relevant image for the subject. Not only can you use it for your onpage SEO but it can add interest for the reader.

7. Make your keyword prominent in the first sentence and the last sentence of the text on your web page. Apparently, the search engines often pay more attention to the beginning and end of the content on your page.

Keyword Density for Onpage SEO

You will want to scatter your key phrase throughout your web page’s content. Keyword density is usually measured as a percentage of the total words on a page. So, if your web page contains 100 words and your key phrase appears three times, your keyword density should be three percent (assuming your key phrase is just one word). You might assume that the higher the keyword density, the better it is for onpage SEO, but this is not necessarily the case. Too high a keyword density will get your page penalized by the search engines. Besides, overloading your content with your key phrase will make your content less readable and therefore less appealing to your readers. There’s no point getting people to your web page just to see them leave again out of boredom or frustration.

A keyword density of around three percent is ideal, but a density anywhere between one and five percent is fine. The caveat to all this is that it should read sensibly so don’t get too hung up on getting exactly three percent. It’s far more important to keep your visitor’s interest so they keep reading. Onpage SEO is there to serve the needs of your website. Don’t make your website a slave to onpage SEO.

Ray Whittaker is an Internet Marketer, coach and mentor. He is a member of the Six Figure Mentors. If you want to read more articles on Internet Marketing, visit his blog at raywhittaker.com/blog. Get a 7-day video bootcamp to get you started with your own on-line marketing business – absolutely free at online-income-system.com

Link Building is an integral part of a Webmaster’s daily routine. This article identifies the best available techniques online today.

Every webmaster knows the importance of building quality backlinks to his/her site over time. However, this should be done with caution as building too many links in a relatively short period could cause your site to be completely ignored by the search engines.

What are Backlinks?
These are links on other websites directed back to your site. The importance and popularity of your site is usually determined by how many webmasters consider a link to your site viable. However, the quality of the backlinks you gather is what the search engines are really interested in.

What are Quality Backlinks?
These a backlinks from websites with similar content to yours. It’s all a game of relevancy and has a lot to do with the success of your website and marketing efforts. Building backlinks to your site is top priority if you ever hope for a better PR or SERP. There are several legitimate ways of doing this without engaging the so called “black hat” techniques that’ll only get you banned from google and other quality search engines.

Write Articles and submit to Article Directories.
Writing articles and submitting them to article directories is a simple, but very powerful and effective way to create interest and generate traffic to your site. Best of all, it’s absolutely FREE.

Basically it works like this. You write interesting articles and submit them to article directories for webmasters & publishers to use freely on their sites, blogs & in their written works. However, they have to use the article as it is and are not allowed to change it. In the authors resource box within the article, you place a link back to your website so that any reader who likes your work would most likely click on your URL, visit your site and ultimately get you some targeted free traffic.

Your articles should be short, informative and straight to the point. A typical article word-count is usually btw 400-700 words.

Submit your site to Web Directories.
Submitting your website to quality directories online and deep linking within them will not only increase your link popularity but your website PR and SERP as well. Make a list of the top web directories online and manually submit your URL to them. Some would require a reciprocal link back to your site and some will charge a fee for inclusion. Which ever the case, submitting your URL for inclusion in these directorys will guarantee you have some quality backlinks to your website.

Participate in Forums.
You can find forums all over the internet focused on a diverse range of niches. But the “making money at home, internet marketing, webmaster & SEO” forums are by far the most popular. Register for an account with forums in the above niche market and post regularly to the board. Participate constructively in discussions and remember to leave your site URL in your signature so it appears in every post and thread that you participate in.

Be supportive and gradually become a source of good and clean information, become a valued community member. By doing this, you’ll build up reputation and create valuable credibility for yourself. This way, rest assured your site will always be visited by your forum community thus increasing your link popularity and quality backlinks.

There are more techniques that a webmaster can utilize to bulid links and improve SEO for his/her websites, but applying the above link building blueprints will certainly guarantee results, with a little hard work.