If your in a competitive niche you need to have every competitive advantage to achieve results. Correct on page elements could be the that razor edge you need to achieve the top spots that will result in traffic and more importantly conversions.

One clarity I would like to firstly make is that we are not discussing any type of meta data or overly talked about on page SEO, we are simply referring to the page elements, all the elements that would make up a 100% perfect page independent of titles, meta descriptions, alt tags, internal linking and so on.

On page elements including formatting is proven to play a big role in not only a pages search engine rankings, but equally importantly the pages usability and conversion rate.

For instructional purposes I will actually FORMAT this page in a style that is as about as SEO friendly as I can get it with all the examples and use as many elements as I can find that are applicable to the topic. The below points will also be listed in order of importance.

Step One: The Page Heading

The key to a good page heading (apart from it needing to be big and bold which we will cover later) is having something catchy and memorable. I browsed though a list of books today in an email that would have run at least 50 book listing deep and I only remember one! Funnily enough the name of the book was “ATTENTION! This Will Make You Money!” By Jim Kukral – How to use attention getting online marketing to increase your revenue.

Do not make the mistake of overlooking this step, a captivating heading could be the make or break of your pages bounce rate which is definitely considered an ever increasing important SEO factor, and dont make the second mistake of thinking your smart not having google analytics installed so Google cant tell what you bounce rate is, it can calculate it anyway through the visitors return to the search results page when they smack the back button.

Lastly, please dont judge me on my page heading or use it as an example. Writing intriguing page headings is definitely something that I can improve on, probably another reason I remembered that book from the list of 50.

Step Two: Text Formatting

The bottom line here is that you should be using as much formatting variation in your text as possible. Plain text in an article from start to finish is one of the most boring and difficult to endure style of pages there is. Obviously you dont want the page to look like you have a mental disease but 99% of people need to use more not less.

Just some of the text formatting styles that I can think of right now are:

  • Heading Tags (h1′s, H2′s, H3′s and so on)
  • Blod Text
  • Italic Text
  • Bold And Italic Text
  • CAPITOL LETTERS
  • Strike Through
  • Underlined, Underlined Bold & Italic WITH SOME CAPS
  • Hundreds Of Custom Charters ©, ™, ?, ½,
  • Keyboard Shortcut Charters !@#$%^&()_+=-?><”:}{|/.,’;\][~

Step Three: Style/Page Formatting

Well I am no super ninja coder or nothing, so I will leave the more advanced stuff that I may have left out to your own research but there is a huge amount of commonly used formats. Again here are some of the ones I could come up with and use on a regular basis, start with “text align” the paragraph you are reading is aligned center encase you didn’t notice…

Colored Text

Block Quotes

  1. Numbered Lists
  • Bullet Lists

And lastly Tables

row 1, cell 1 row 1, cell 2
row 2, cell 1 row 2, cell 2

Step Four: Media Elements

Images Video Audio PDF word doc other resources you can think of. This is all that comes to mind at present.

Step Six: External Links

A site that never links externally is unnatural and search engines dont like unnatural. Though many SEO experts may tell you NEVER to link externally or reduce it as much as possible, I personally believe that though these people have the best intentions they have been misguided and taken a walk down the wrong street. The startegy was never to remove or no follow all external links, it was simply to ensure that your site is not linking out to sites of low quality and possibly unrelated. I wont go into this too much however I will say that anyone looking to get their site ranking in a search engine is now faced with the difficulty of prying a link out of a college, supplier, business associate or friend in an effort to improve their rankings only to be rejected because the people they are requesting links from either have an SEO adviser or has simply read an article that tells them not to do it! At best you will get a no followed link an a page that has been restricted by the robot text file… Very sad indeed.
The implications of this is that spammers like me :) who know how to go about getting links through other means are given even more power to control the search results and in turn leaving the individual with a quality site and product out of visible range.

So in short, link out, on every page if need be. If a person cannot find all the necessary information they need on your page help them out and send them somewhere that does, just ensure the place you are linking to is reputable, Wiki is a good choice and my personal favorite.

Shortened URL’s, use them on occasions where necessary. Not only do they provide external link tracking they look cleaner and they reduce page size and code. These are the best two: bit.ly & goo.gl

Social integration: You can never go wrong linking to a reputable social sites. Here is a huge list of them.

Nofollows? Information on when, where and how to best utilise no follows is plagued all over the internet. In keeping with the above point here are some good resource I found, I even used a URL shortener for the unsightly SEO Book URL:

Step 6: Continuity

Did you notice that I just used “step 6″ with the number 6 in the above sub heading? where as with all the previous steps I numbered the steps in text. I should have made this heading “Step Six“