Onpage Search Engine Ranking Factors

In an earlier post I mentioned that you needed need to understand 2 things about search engine optimisation, they were ‘Onpage’ SEO and ‘Offpage’ SEO. If you don’t know what these are then don’t worry because I’m going to go through each one in detail. However if you can’t wait to know what they are, I’ll go through them briefly now. That way you can always do your own research.

To start with I am going to list ‘Onpage’ search engine ranking factors that have a positive effect on the position of your website. As I mentioned earlier, when I am talking about search engine optimisation I am referring to Google search engine optimisation. Firstly, because Google gets the most traffic it the search engine you should want to try to rank for and secondly because if you can rank for google then you can probably rank for Yahoo and bing (although their algorithms are slightly different).

Positive Onpage search engine ranking factors

1. Keyword Rich Domain names – Very important
2. Keywords used in the URL – Important.
3. Title tag – Keywords in it? – General consensus from seo professionals is that this is very important.
4. Description tag – Keywords in it? Less important for seo but a good way to attract visitors.
5. Keyword tag – Keywords in it? Debatable as to the level of seo influence but worthwhile doing
6. Density of keywords in the body of the text – Aim for between 2 – 20%, do not spam.
7. The keyword density of individual keywords.
8. The font size of the keywords.
9. Keyword proximity (this is if there are 2 or more keywords)
10. The phrase order of the keywords.
11. The actual position you place the keywords on your page.
12. Using keywords in the alternative text – NEVER KEYWORD STUFF ALT TEXT!!
13. Keywords used in the anchor text of internal linking
14. Check that all internal links are valid (i.e. actually working).
15. Effective internal linking structure – best practise is no page to be more than 2 links deep and definitely no more than 4 pages.
16. Intra site linking.
17. Outgoing links – what keywords have you used? *** The sites you choose to link to can have a big effect on where you rank. Choose wisely! You must constantly check the sites that you are linking to.
18. Relevant anchor text in your external linking.
19. Outgoing link consistency – Are you constantly changing the sites your are linking to?
20. External links still working – You must constantly check that your external links are still valid.
21. Number of links on your page between 50 – 100 – Google specifically mentions in its webmaster guidelines that you should keep the number of outgoing links per page to under 100. However the validity of this is often challenged as
22. Top level domains – .gov, .edu, .org are give weight by Goolge. .com is also a top level domain.
23. Size of page – Generally best to try to keep each page under 100k.
24. Using hyphens in the url – Can be excellent for breaking up keywords, although don’t over use them.
25. How fresh are your pages?
26. Freshness of content – How many new pages are you adding. Remember google loves content.
27. The theme of the site – is it relevant and structured in a way that helps the search engines crawl it.
28. Extending reach by keyword stemming –
29. Latent Semantic Indexing – Debate as to whether this is makes a difference.
30. The actual length of the URL.
31. URL Canonicalization
32. The age of the domain name – The older the more trusted.
33. Markup Validity of web documents.
34. Use of robots.txt file.
35. Use of sitemap.

There you go, a list of 35 ‘Onpage’ search engine ranking factors that have a positive effect on where a website will rank. The importance of each of these factors varies and really I wouldn’t get too worried about these factors. You only really need to learn how to do some basic ‘Onpage’ SEO.

Also as you will learn, it is the ‘Offpage’ SEO, which really makes a difference to where your site ranks. There are lots of websites that have absolutely no relevant ‘Onpage’ SEO for particular keywords that rank extremely highly. If you really wanted to, it is possible to rank for keywords that are totally unrelated to web pages (though it would be a bit pointless!).

I hope you enjoyed this post and it has given you a little food for thought and what are relevant ‘Onpage’ search engine ranking factors.