Last week I introduced the concept of the Three Pillars of Search Engine Optimisation – on-page m content; off-page networking; under the bonnet.

This week, I am going to summarise the first column, on-page content.

As with all areas of SEO, on-page best practice has developed dramatically over the last few years.  Keyword stuffing was the previous order of the day, but search engines have become savvy over the years – they are now able to understand the context of the page (kind of!), and the unnatural frequency of keywords will count against you.

So, what actually are your keywords?!  The identification of your keywords is an area that is worth researching in more depth, but broadly speaking, you want to find keywords that are popular enough to have people searching for them, but not so popular that there is a lot of competition from websites with huge budgets: not an easy brief!  But you can test the quality of keywords with a PPC account fairly quickly and at a relatively low cost before you commit any SEO resource to them.

Once you’ve got your keywords, the content on page should be written about the keyword – it should be easy to read, be written naturally, interesting and helping the user out with a problem, e.g. to provide information.  It also needs to be shareable, as this will help our second pillar (but more on that next week!).  Depending on the content that you are providing, you should have social sharing buttons on your site so that your internet user can become an advocate of your website – this is a huge contributor to SEO success.

One of the most important things to remember with SEO is that it is a means to satisfying your internet users.  SEO is just a means of getting the users to come to your site.  So on-page, your focus should be on satisfying the user – giving the user something that they will find interesting, would like to share, and can help them solve the issue that they are looking to solve.