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Search engine optimization (SEO) can sometimes seem like a mysterious, mythical thing.  We all know getting your website to rank highly in search engines is key for getting your website found and ultimately, the success of your organization in today’s digital age. 

But how do you go about improving your search engine ranking?  An SEO strategy has a lot of moving parts, and on-page SEO and off-page SEO both play an important role in increasing your website’s traffic.

In this post, we’ll focus on on-site SEO, or the practice of placing your most important keywords within the content elements of your website pages.  These on-page elements include Headlines, Sub-Headlines, Body Content, Image Tags and Links.  Many times, on-page SEO is referred to as “keyword density”.

Related:  How To Use Link Building To Increase Search Engine Ranking

It’s very common that businesses will do too little on-page optimization or too much (keyword stuffing).  While it’s important to include your keyword as many times as necessary within a page, you don’t want to go overboard with it either. For on-page SEO done right:

• Pick a primary keyword for each page and focus on optimizing that page for that word. If you use too many keywords on a page, the page will lose its importance and authority because search engines won’t have a clear idea of what the page is about. This is especially common on homepages where too many keywords are often used.
• Place your primary keywords in your headline and sub-headline.  These areas of content have greater weight to search engines.
• Include the keywords in the body content but don’t use them out of context.  Make sure they’re relevant with the rest of your content.
• Include keywords in the file name of images (i.e. mykeyword.jpg) or use them in the ALT tag.
• Include the keywords in the page URL and keep the URL clean.
• Write for humans first, search engines second.  Always prepare your content for your audience and then look to optimize if for search engines. Content written for search engines won’t read naturally and your visitors will recognize it, which defeats the purpose of your website getting found.