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What are On-Page Factors?

There are several on-page factors that affect search engine rankings. These include:

Content of Page

The content of a page is what makes it worthy of a search result position. It is what the user came to see and is thus extremely important to the search engines. As such, it is important to create good content. So what is good content? From an SEO perspective, all good content has two attributes. Good content must supply a demand and must be linkable.

Good content supplies a demand:

Just like the world’s markets, information is affected by supply and demand. The best content is that which does the best job of supplying the largest demand. It might take the form of an XKCD comic that is supplying nerd jokes to a large group of technologists or it might be a Wikipedia article that explains to the world the definition of Web 2.0. It can be a video, an image, a sound, or text, but it must supply a demand in order to be considered good content.

Good content is linkable:

From an SEO perspective, there is no difference between the best and worst content on the Internet if it is not linkable. If people can’t link to it, search engines will be very unlikely to rank it, and as a result the content won’t drive traffic to the given website. Unfortunately, this happens a lot more often than one might think. A few examples of this include: AJAX-powered image slide shows, content only accessible after logging in, and content that can't be reproduced or shared. Content that doesn't supply a demand or is not linkable is bad in the eyes of the search engines—and most likely some people, too.

Title Tag

Title tags are the second most important on-page factor for SEO, after content. You can read more information about title tags here.

URL

Along with smart internal linking, SEOs should make sure that the category hierarchy of the given website is reflected in URLs.

The following is a good example of URL structure:

http://www.dmoz.org/Games/Video_Games/History/
This URL clearly shows the hierarchy of the information on the page (history as it pertains to video games in the context of games in general). This information is used to determine the relevancy of a given web page by the search engines. Due to the hierarchy, the engines can deduce that the page likely doesn’t pertain to history in general but rather to that of the history of video games. This makes it an ideal candidate for search results related to video game history. All of this information can be speculated on without even needing to process the content on the page.

The following is a bad example of URL structure:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468569/
Unlike the first example, this URL does not reflect the information hierarchy of the website. Search engines can see that the given page relates to titles (/title/) and is on the IMDB domain but cannot determine what the page is about. The reference to “tt0468569” does not directly infer anything that a web surfer is likely to search for. This means that the information provided by the URL is of very little value to search engines.

URL structure is important because it helps the search engines to understand relative importance and adds a helpful relevancy metric to the given page. It is also helpful from an anchor text perspective because people are more likely to link with the relevant word or phrase if the keywords are included in the URL.

SEO Best Practice

Content pages are the meat of websites and are almost always the reason visitors come to a site. Ideal content pages should be very specific to a given topic—usually a product or an object—and be hyper-relevant.

The purpose of the given web page should be directly stated in all of the following areas:

• Title tag
• URL
• Content of page
• Image alt text

Related Tools

Mozbar:
The MozBar SEO toolbar lets you see relevant metrics in your browser as you surf the web.

Open Site Explorer
Open Site Explorer is a free tool that gives webmasters the ability to analyze up to 10,000 links to any site or page on the web via the Mozscape web index.

Term Target
Helps determine how targeted a particular page is for a specified keyword by analyzing a variety of factors.

External Resources

SEO Advice: Writing useful articles that readers will love
Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team shares his thoughts on good content.

Google-friendly sites
Google's official documentation on building Google-friendly websites.