On Page SEO

Written by Brandon Schultz on Jan 9, 2012 1:09 pm

A lot of new bloggers struggle with how to get their content ranked in the search engines. There are essentially two types of SEO, on page and off page. What we’ll focus on here is the on page SEO. When a search engine crawls your page it indexes all of the content and uses it to determine relevance to a particular search query. For example if you have a high occurrence of the words “weight loss” on your page it will consider it a relevant match for anyone searching for those exact words. Very basic, I know.

The reality is a lot of people pay huge sums of money to have companies do their on page SEO. Heck, you can pay me to do it if you like. That’s fine but with a couple of simple tools there is no reason you can’t do it yourself.

Step one is to do some keyword research on Google Adwords to determine what keyword or key phrase you want to rank for. This handy tool will tell you how many people search for the keyword per month and how large the competition is. This is where you need to get creative. For a new blogger with a low authority site I would suggest finding a keyword that receives 3-500 monthly searches. As your site gains authority you can go bigger but I wouldn’t start higher than that.

Now you have to create a piece of content using that keyword frequently. This is where a lot of people overdo it. It is important to keep the flow of the content as well. It has to make sense to the people who are going to read it. What good is ranking in the search engines if no one wants to read through your content? You can and should use slight variations of the word as well. Having a high keyword density in your document is important but certainly not the only factor.

Beyond keyword density search engines look for certain formatting on text that includes the keyword. You need to include heading formats, bold, italics and underlining of the keyword. In addition they look to see where the keyword is placed throughout the content. Internal links must be included as well as images with specific tags.

While you can spend the time doing all of this formatting yourself I prefer a plug-in called SEO Pressor. You simply write your post or page, tell SEO Pressor what keyword you are trying to rank for and it reformats your content for you. If you’ve missed something the plug-in will let you know. SEO Pressor has a scoring system that tells you how well the content is optimized. It takes all of the guess work out of the process and saves you time.

That’s all there is to it. To check out the SEO Pressor plug-in you can click here. If you don't have a PROFESSIOANL looking blog visit Blog Installation for more information on how to get one.