On Page Optimisation
Once you have selected the keywords you want to optimise your website for, you must choose which pages to use for each keyword. Ideally you should choose one page for each keyword but you can group keywords together and optimise single pages for up 2, 3 or possibly 4 different keywords. It is a good idea to optimise your home page for the most competitive keywords. Choose inner pages that are most relevant to each keyword.
There are many places on your web page you can add your keyword to, to improve your rankings. The most import places are;
1: The title tag
2: The meta description tag
3: The heading or H1 tag
4: Other headings, H2, h3 etc
5: The main body text, 1st and last sentence
6: The domain name or URL
This is the main part of on page optimisation but there are other places that can be used that do not carry as much weight like the alt tag, bold, italic, same domain link text and outbound link text.
The keyword density is not as import as it used to be years ago but you should still be aware that you should not over optimise your pages. The search engines may consider a high density of keywords to be spam and down grade your ranking or even ban your site. Having a high density of your keyword in the main body text will not help. As long as your keyword appears 2 to 3 times this should be sufficient. The best way to find out what exactly is required is to analyse the your competitors websites that have page one rankings for your keywords.
You should also try and use similar words to your keywords and use content that is relevant to your keywords. This is known as LSI.
Other important factors that may help your ranking are domain age, server speed, HTML validation, number of visitors, top level domain, .com, .net or country TLDs such as .co.uk tend to rank better.
For more competitive keywords you must use off page optimisation factors, see off page optimisation.
There are also some negative factors you should be aware of. If these appear on your page this could have an adverse effect on your rankings.
Duplicate title and meta description tags. Duplicate or similar content. Do not link to poor quality or spam site, do not sell links and make sure your server is reliable as down time will have a negative effect.
When you have all this in place it is time to look at off page optimisation.
