One issue we come across more than any other when it comes to poor results from new linking campaigns is down to web pages that don’t have even the most basic optimisation.

You can keep adding links to a page but if the search engines don’t see the page as relevant then you’re going to have to add 10 times the amount of links you would if you’d just made sure the page adhered to a few basic SEO rules.

Page URL

It is widely acknowledged that having your keyword/phrase in your domain URL helps with the ranking. Obviously you can’t change the domain name of your website to optimise for every keyword you want to rank for but you can optimise the URL structure so it includes your keywords. For example:

www.domain.com/my-keyphrase-for-this-page.html

Page Meta-Title

The most important part of your web page is the meta-title as this tells the search engines what your page is about. If you look at the image below is shows the page title for Amazon.com – their page title is Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, etc. You need to look at your page title and ensure that the key-phrase you want to rank for is included in the title.

Page Titles

Not to be confused with the meta-title, page titles are simply titles in your page content. in html, these appear as <h1>, <h2>, etc and are used to impart important information to your visitors. It is so important that the first piece of content on your page is the <h1> title tag and that it includes your key-phrase. The title above this text is actually an <h1> title tage.

Keyword Density

This is the  amount of times your keyword appears on the page as a percentage of the total words on the page. For example, if your page has 100 words (way too few anyway) and your keyword ‘Blue Widgets’ appeared 2 times then your keyword density would be 2%. Ideally you want to have a minimum of 400 words on a page as a minimum and your keyword density should be around 4% – 6%.

Of course there are literally scores of factors that effect on-page SEO and your ranking but the above are the most fundamental. If you get those right then you stand a much greater chance of your pages ranking well. Get them wrong or even worse, totally omit your target keyword/phrase from your page and you’ll always struggle to improve the ranking.