Getting your on page SEO right is vital if you want to get a high search engine ranking and hence get free traffic. Although this is only part of your SEO activities, good on page SEO provides the base for those other activities. The key to on page SEO is to ensure that the search engines are in no doubt that your page is highly relevant to your keyword(s) without going over the top (which will have a negative effect). At the same time you must ensure that your content is valuable to your visitors.

If you are using WordPress there is a plugin called "SEOPressor" which checks your on page SEO, gives it a percentage score and suggests changes. What this software does is nothing particularly clever. You could devise your own checklist for on page SEO and run through it each time you create some content. This would include tasks like counting the number of times a keyword occurs and dividing this by the total number of words.

This would be time consuming and boring and is an ideal subject for automation. SEOPressor automatically checks your content each time you update and predominately displays the results such that it hard to ignore.

However, with a few exceptions, SEOPressor will not do the work for you. You still have to take the recommendations and act on them. At first this can be quite a bit of work and take longer than writing the content in the first place but I found that this is well worthwhile.

If SEOPressor keeps telling you, for example, that you should have the keyword in the first sentence and you have to rewrite the sentence to achieve this, it does not take long before you start putting the keyword there in the first place. After a while the idea of creating content without the keyword in the first sentence seems strange.

The same applies for other on page SEO factors such as titles, header tags, image tags, internal links, external links, keyword positioning, keyword density and keyword decoration.

An SEO formula you may have seen is:

Search Engine Rank = On-page Leverage x Backlinks

What this is saying is that the better your on page SEO the less backlinks you need to get a high search engine ranking. If you are seeking a high ranking then paying attention to on page SEO is a good investment of your time.