Establish a Level of a Stability with your SEO Strategy - On-page factors
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If you’re going to look at on-page factors, keep if simple
There are six on-page factors that are essential to the proper indexing of your site’s web pages:
• Title
• Image Alt Tags
• Description
• Keyword
• H1 and H2 (level 1 and level 2 headings)
• Body (written content)
Familiarize yourself with these six factors. Establish a systematic approach to integrating these aspects, then stick to your guns. There’s no sense in trying to constantly “tweak” these factors. Because of the unpredictable nature of Search Engine algorithms it is quite possible that what passes as the “perfect” formula today will be considered spam tomorrow. Here is a rough estimate of what I consider when integrating these on-page factors into my site(s), and keep in mind that while there are other on-page factors, these six provide a good foundation:
Title: The title tag should include between 5 and 9 words. The exact phrase of the main target search term (for example: “frogs”) should be included within the context of the tag. This target term or “keyphrase” should account for 25% to 60% of the entire title tag (this is called keyphrase density). If possible, have the keyphrase appear at or near the front of entry.
Image Alt Tags: There is often more than one Alt Image (short for alternative image) tag on any given web page. This is because an Alt. tag is used to describe static images. Therefore, it is important that all static images on a given page have alt. tags. As a general rule more than %50, but less than 100% of all Alt. tags on a given page should include the keyphrase (for example: “frogs”). As a rule of thumb 3 out of every 4 alt. tags for a given page should include the keyphrase. However, it is important that these alt. tags properly identify the image. We don’t want to label an image “fantasy basketball” if it is an image pointing to the homepage.
H1 and H2 (level 1 and level 2 headings): This popular CSS command should be used to “highlight” our keyphrase. If the keyphrase occurs within the body of the given web page then the H1 tag should be used on that specific occurrence. In most cases, using (bold) or (italics) on the keyphrase is a suitable substitute for the H1 tag.
Description: The description tag should be no more than 2 sentences (20 words) long. It should be an objective description of the specific Web page and should incorporate the keyphrase.
Keyword: The keyword tag should include 6 to 20 words or phrases. The first entry should always be the main keyphrase.
Body: Make sure that the body (written content) of your page includes your target keyphrase 1-3 times. Try to keep the content to between the 250-500 words, but if you go over it’s not the end of the world.
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