It is easy to overlook proper on page SEO and move onto link building (off page SEO) too soon. This is a big mistake that many people make which makes the task of achieving a high search engine ranking much more difficult.

Earlier this year I saw some figures which showed the factors that Google take into account when deciding where to rank a page. I do not know if these were accurate (and they are now out of date) but let's assume they were in the right sort of ballpark. These showed the weightings as:

Backlinks 65% - Taking into account the number of links, the authority of the page the link is from and the anchor text used.

Other Factors 20% - Including traffic volumes, domain age and speed of loading.

On Page SEO 15% - The keywords relevant to the page.

You might conclude from this that on page SEO is not important but this is not the case. It is useful to think of on page SEO as you telling Google what your page is about. Having noted that Google looks to see what other people think your page is about and how popular it is. They give more weight to what other people say than what you say about yourself.

The problem is that if you say nothing or send out a confusing message you are going to need vastly more other people saying your page is good before you get a good ranking.

To see an interesting example enter the keyword - click here - into Google.com. You will see that most of the top pages listed are download pages from the likes of Adobe, Apple and Microsoft. These sites have done no on page SEO for this term and do not have the words "click here" on the page but they do have vast numbers of backlinks.

However, the interesting thing is that the number two site is an advertising agency called Click Here. Their page listed has a Page Rank of 5 with 390 backlinks and it is listed ahead of Apple Quicktime download which is Page Rank 9 with over 1 million backlinks. We have to conclude from this that they did some on page SEO and said they were about "click here" whereas Apple didn't.

So you need to send a strong and clear message as to the keyword(s) to which your page is relevant. This on page SEO is not the most exciting task but it is well worth doing properly and there are tools to help.