Don't Flag Your Site With Bad Onsite SEO – Be Good

NOTE – Our DIY SEO guide has been updated: Go to Beginner – Learn Google SEO Tips & Tactics :)

OK so that’s most of the on-page seo I consider dealt with. There’s not that much to it. You can control on-page seo, but I would think Google is looking for flags to demote a website or page, not promote it. So know the issues – know that people spam the hell on site. Try and stand apart while keeping it as simple as you possibly can.

ADD – The more I write this the more I don’t want to spread misinformation. This isn’t a crusade – I am just blogging here – if you have a comment to make about anything I have written, or even better a different point of view, please let me know in the comments on any of the posts. I’m always looking to hear about other people’s observations. I’ve been slapped before and Sebastian is a pal now :)

The key is not to flag your site as sh*t to the big G, and I think if you navigate on-page seo successfully, you’re ready to get to the on-site stuff Google really rewards – internal links.

But first lets recap

1. Don’t Make A Spammy Page Title
2. Don’t Spam Your Meta Description
3. Don’t Spam Your Keyword Meta Tags
4. Note The Robots Metatag
5. Don’t Spam Heading Tags
6. Forget About How Many Words You Need
7. Know The Perfect Keyword Density For SEO
8. Link Internal To Relevant Pages
9. Link Out To Related Sites
10. Consider Redirecting Non WWW To WWW, Google
11. Don’t Optimize Your ALT Tags For Google
12. Consider Search Engine Friendly URLs
13. Forget About Keywords In Bold Or Italic
14. Absolute Or Relative URLS
15. Directories or Files
16. PHP, HTML or ASP
17. Does W3C Valid HTML & CSS Help SEO?
18. 301 Old Pages To Strengthen Existing Pages
19. On-Site Duplicate Content
20. Fix Broken Links

For me, the key is to keep it as clean as possible on-site over the greatest amount of time. Forget about tricks like links in H1 tags etc and linking to the same page 3 times with different anchor text on one page. Forget about ‘which is best’ when considering things you shouldn’t be wasting your time with. Every tag on your page is a score. Put a keyword in every tag and you will flag your site as ‘trying too hard’ if you aint got the link trust to cut it.

So with regards to on page, do not spam any of the above. Don’t spam your anchor text link titles with the same keyword. Don’t spam your ALT Tags, or any other tags either. Add your keywords intelligently. Try and make the site mostly for humans, not search engines. Even Google says this, and I believe them this time.

On Page SEO is not a checklist any more of keyword here, keyword there. We’re up against brainy folk here. But for those who need a checklist, this is the sort of one that gets me results;

1. Identify Your Keywords
2. Identify Searcher Intent Opportunites
3. Identify The Audience & The Reason For Your Article
4. Write An Article. Use related terms. Use plurals. Use words with searcher intent like buy, compare. I like to get a keyword or related term in every paragraph
5. Use Emphasis sparingly To Emphasise the important points in the page wether they are your keywords are not
6. Pick An Intelligent Page Title with your keyword in it @ 10 words
7. Write An Intelligent Meta Description @ 20 words
8. Add an image with user centric ALT text
9. Link to related pages on your site within the text
10. Link to related pages on other sites
11. Call your page file name something clean, as part of a clean
12. At all times, Keep It Simple Stupid!
13. You can forget about just about everything else.