On-page SEO factors: What works, and what doesn’t

In our introductory lesson “Getting traffic to your site with SEO” we talked about how search engine optimization (SEO) is the general term for things you can do to make your website appear closer to the top of the natural search engine listings.

We also talked about how SEO falls into two categories: On-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page being the things you can change within your website to make it more attractive to the search engines, and off-page being the things that aren’t actually on your website that can help bump you up — like getting links from other websites.

In this lesson we’re going to go over some on-page factors for your website. There are some tricks which are widely acknowledged to work, some tricks that might have an effect, and others which used to make a difference but have become less useful as the search engines have got smarter. Because you’ll probably see people talking about all of these at some point or other, we’ll go over them all.