How do you know if you have a problem with your on page SEO and what should you do about it?

Let's assume that you have gone out and got backlinks to your site from a range of sites, many using your preferred anchor text, but you are still not ranking as you hoped in the search engines.

The first thing to look at is did you simply pick the wrong keywords. The initial keyword research is the most important aspect of SEO (both on page SEO and off page SEO) as there is no point is using very competitive keywords where you are up against big companies with big marketing budgets. You need to pick keywords with a reasonable volume of searches where the competition is not too strong. For example it is a good sign if you see an article from an article directory ranking on page 1.

If your keywords are ok you need to look at the sites ranking above you, to try and see why they are in that position. There are some free tools to help with this. The free version of Traffic Travis (http://www.traffictravis.com) will let you analyse a keyword to see the top 20 sites and various information about them. In particular you can see how many backlinks they have to that page and to the site in total. There is also some information as to how they have used the keyword in their on page SEO. Although other factors come into it (like Page Rank, Age of Domain etc.) if you have more backlinks than a site ranking above you this is a warning that you maybe doing something wrong with your on page SEO.

One thing to look at is the "legal" pages on your site which is actually part of your on page SEO. I recently had a site move up from 20th to 9th on Google simply by adding a couple of pages with links in the footer. You should have About Us, Contact Us, Privacy Policy, DMCA Policy, Anti-Spam Policy, Terms of Use.

Is there anything about your on page SEO that could be having a negative effect? For example you need to be careful about external links. Although it is good to have these they must be to reputable sites and not too numerous. If you link to disreputable sites (which engage in black hat SEO) this can have a negative effect on your site.

Have you optimised your content properly? Maybe you have not used your keywords sufficiently or not used them in the right places. On the other hand maybe you went to the other extreme and used them too much, which can be worse for on page SEO.

If you are using WordPress there is a plugin you can use to check on page SEO and give recommendations for improvement.