What is Onpage Search Engine Optimization? 

Well, to better answer that question we need to define what Search engine optimization is first.

Ok! What Is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something that many people have heard of but few people really and truly understand. People tend to treat this subject the same way how people treat accounting. This is very unfortunate because as an internet marketer one of the best things you can do for your business is to thoroughly understand what Search Engine Optimization means and how you can go about becoming an expert at it.

The single biggest way that Search Engine Optimization will help you is in generating free targeted traffic for your website, especially by using long-tailed keywords. If you don't know what long-tailed keyword means, stop now and read my article on long-tailed keyword. I'll just say this is not something that you fish out of water, ok?

Free targeted traffic. This means that people that visit your website will actually be looking for what it is that you have to offer and you can probably understand how this will improve your conversion rate much better than non-targeted traffic. In addition, if you have a website that is properly optimized for use in the search engines you are going to save money because you will not need to spend as much on other methods of traffic generation like pay per click advertising.

Now that you understand how Search Engine Optimization is going to be useful to you it is time to get into some of the basics of the SEO process.

There are generally two parts to SEO that you want to be aware of, "on-page" optimization factors and "off-page" optimization factors.

On-page optimization factors are things that you can change on your website in order to make the website more friendly to search engines. These are things like keyword density within paragraphs as well as keyword placement within the title of the webpage, Meta tags, bolding, underline and italicizing of keywords within the webpage. These are all factors that affect how search engines view your webpage and getting these just right is one of the keys to proper Search Engine Optimization.

While on-page factors are important, anyone that has done SEO work before will be able to tell you that it is the off-page optimization factors that really make the search engines love your page, primarily like link building through article marketing, social bookmarking, forum marketing, blogging, bulk emailing, blah blah blah.

Recent trends in Search Engine Optimization have been set in by a lot of search engines in order to combat the "black hat" techniques many dishonest marketers have been using in order to get their websites good rankings. These trends have made it much more difficult to get your site well-ranked in search engines and indeed it can take months before you even get a sniff of the top. Anyway, we will be talking about what we can do to your web pages that will help you to rank much higher in the search engine and hopefully to get a lot more targeted traffic.

Most modern search engines now scan, index, and rank web pages automatically using automated crawlers with sophisticated algorithms. The search engine companies do not disclose their algorithms in an attempt to curb artificially high page rankings. In order to rank highly in most popular search engines today, webmasters must develop content that incorporates certain SEO techniques to take advantage of these new methods of page rankings.

Long-tailed Keywords are the single most important aspect of on-page SEO for the Internet. Therefore, before writing a single word of content, it is extremely important to develop a list of long-tailed keywords that potential readers will be use to find the web page. Keyword lists on a variety of topics are easily found online. However, brainstorming longtailed keywords based on the subject of the written content can be just as effective.

The importance of picking the right keywords is paramount to producing high-ranking web pages and should not be overlooked. The prominence, order, and density of keywords on the web page are vitally important in how search engines ultimately index and rank web pages. The title of the web page is the most important attribute of the web page and therefore should include one or more keywords.

Next in importance for the use of long tailed keywords are any headers or bolded words in the content. Keyword density within the body text should generally be roughly between five to twenty percent depending on the subject matter. Pages that contain keywords that are located close to each other also tend to rank higher.

The next most important factor affecting page rank is the usage of hyper-links within a web page. Links should be relevant to the content and care should be taken to choose relevant keywords to describe the links. The actual length of the hyper-link and filename can also affect the relevancy of the link to the web page. It is obvious that dead links should not be used, but often overlooked is the need to return to web pages after a certain time has passed to ensure the links still point to their original location.

As essential as the use of keywords and links are, there are penalties for use of "bad" keywords and links. Any vile language or ethnic slurs will definitely have a negative effect on page ranking. The practice of ‘keyword stuffing" should be avoided as most search engines can detect when keyword density has exceeded a certain threshold for a particular topic.

Any links to inappropriate content and excessive use of cross-linking will also severely downgrade page ranking. So your links have to be relevant or it must relate within the same topic of discussion.

When attempting to maximize the amount of traffic to a web page, the careful choice and placement of keywords and hyper-links when developing content, a Webmaster can create consistently high-ranking web pages. Care must also be taken to avoid the pitfalls of keyword and hyper-link usage to minimize penalties assessed by most modern complex Internet search engine algorithms.

My next article will talk about exact steps needed to perform your own on-page seo.

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