Since this is a brand new blog, I’m going to start off by getting back to basics. I’ve seen all kinds of information about very specific tactics out there, and some of what I see is even to esoteric for me. I thought I would put together a very basic list of what I call “On Page SEO Best Practices.” This is as opposed to “off-page” or “external” tactics such as link building or blogging. This article is focused on things you should be doing directly on the page you are tring to optimize.
Before I get started on my “bullet list,” I want to make a note about keyword frequency…
Search engines that support partial matching, like Google, figure keyword frequency as:
total number of any word in keyword phrase ÷ number of words in keyword phrase
So a page title that reads “Minneapolis Hotels, Twin Cities Hotels” would have a keyword frequency of 1.5 for the keyword “Minneapolis Hotels” because there are 3 total appearances of any word in the phrase (Minneapolis once and Hotels twice) and the keyword phrase contains 2 words total, so 3 ÷ 2 = 1.5.
Also, you will notice that I mention in my list below things like “a keyword should appear several times” and you may ask yourself “how many times is ‘several?’” The answer is those numbers can vary depending on the competitiveness of a keyword and what the competing pages are doing. I would recommend using a tool like Web Position’s “Page Critic” or something similar to analize pages for you. It’s alot quicker and less mind-numbing than trying to count these things manually!
So here we go, nothing below is earth shattering or a magic bullet for good rankings, but these are the basics and you should make sure you have them covered!
Best Practices Bullet Points
- Each keyword should be in the page title tag <title></title> exactly 1 time and it should be as near to the beginning of the title as possible. This is why I try to convince clients to not put the name of their company first in every title tag of every page. The title tag should be limited to 7 – 9 total words. If a keyword does not appear in a page title, you have practically no chance for top rankings.
- The keyword should be contained within a header tag (preferably <h1>) exactly one time.
- Keywords contained in header tags should be as close to the top of the page as possible.
- There should not be an excessive amount of words contained within header tags on the page as a whole. Eliminate header tags (<h1>, <h2>, <h3> ) where they do not contain keywords or where they contain keywords that appear in the page previously within header tags. Using CSS, you can format a <p> tag or a <span> tag to dispaly text any way you like, you don’t need to use header tags.
- The keyword should be linked to additional content at least several times times and those links should be as close to the top of the page as possible.
- There should several links on the page that go to another page on your site where the URL contains the keyword (e.g. www.yourdomain.com/keyword.html). It is best to separate words within URLs with a hyphen, for example your-keyword.html is better than yourkeyword.html or your_keyword.html.
- The keyword should appear within the text of the page at least several times and they should be as close to the top of the page as possible.
- More text on a page is better than less. Try to have at least 600 or so words of copy on a page.
- The keyword should appear several times throughout the page as a whole (this means linked text, hyperlinked URL, body text, headers, and title all added together).
- All CSS and Javacripts should be linked to the page via source files and not placed inline on the page itself.
Hope this helps!
Mic
Your Friendly Neighborhood Minneapolis SEO Specialist 
