Whilst moaning to myself over my traffic (and income) stats, recently, I came across a few anecdotes on how some SEO firms had improved their client’s rankings with simple on-page SEO factors. I decided to revisit this area, and see whether I had done as much as I could with it.

I came to the rather unpleasant realization that when I moved my site over from a previous host, and done some updates to stay in line with google’s adsense terms of service, that I had unwittingly altered my on-page SEO factors for the worse.

Fortunately, they’re a rather simple, if not tedious, thing to rectify. - Tedious though, if you have a number of sites, and large sites at that.

Funnily enough, in my quest for links, I had not even considered that these things were that important anymore. Links are by far the most crucial factor, but on page elements still provide a ranking boost, especially with yahoo and MSN. And even with google, when there are not many points separating sites, everything counts.

So, what on-page SEo factors should you look at?

• Title
• meta keywords
• meta description
• images with title and alt tags
• the judicious use of bold and italics
• outbound link text
• H1 and other heading tags

On-page factors play another role, and that is helping search engines decide what your page is about. Thus the meta keyword tag should include your main keywords - but only if they are on your page. On no account should this tag be stuffed with all manner of keyword. Unlike social bookmarking, the keywords used there do need to be on that page.

Of course, with links into your site, you have a little more flexibility there.

Don’t overdo any one thing, but pay attention to each. The use of images can also make the page look more inviting - and classy - to the reader. Now that most people have faster internet access, pages can afford to be a little ‘heavier’.

For more information on getting increased web traffic with on-page SEO, click here.