SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is made up of two parts. Those parts are on-page SEO factors and off-page promotion. It is widely recognized that, in general, off-page promotion has by far the larger influence in determining the position of a page in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). So the question is, “Can your page achieve top rankings in Google and the other major search engines using ONLY on-page optimisation factors?

Depending on the content of your page and the keywords you are targeting, the answer can be a resounding YES. In addition, the circumstances under which a solely on-page strategy is most effective are pretty much the same as those where the Google sandbox is less likely to come into play. In other words, it should be possible for you to see an almost instant benefit from the work that you do on the HTML and content of your page.

Well then, I guess you want to know what the circumstances are, that would allow your page to rank well WITHOUT the benefit of off-page optimization i.e. with NO external promotion and NO links from other websites.

It all comes down to the keywords that your page is going to target and that can be further broken down into two main categories. Either your page should target a less popular keyword phrase, often called “long-tail” because it consists of at least three or four words, or your page targets a popular keyword phrase, but with geographical qualifiers like your country, state or city. The easiest way to explain this is with examples.

“Weight Loss” is a very popular keyword phrase and returns over 80 million results in Google, so the chances of ranking high quickly are non-existent. “Gradual weight loss” returns about 700,000 without “quote marks” and only around 45,000 with. Putting your search term inside “quote marks” shows the number of web pages that are actively targeted at a given keyword phrase. If we add the word “program”, at the time of writing this report, only 253 pages are targeted at the keyword phrase “gradual weight loss program”, which makes it a viable phrase to target using onpage SEO.

Another example would be to take the same popular phrase “weight loss” and see what happens when you qualify it with your target geographical location. It is interesting to note that certain keywords are geographically weighted already as you can see when you compare “weight loss California”, with over 23,000 pages against “weight loss Wyoming” with less than 2,000 pages. If we narrow it down further to state capitals, you can see that it would be far easier to get a high ranking for “weight loss Cheyenne” with around 200 targeted pages, than it would for “weight loss Sacramento” with over 1,000. Another quick tip when targeting by location is to embed Google Maps in your page.

As you can see from the above examples, by applying sound on-page SEO strategies, on pages that are targeted at geographical or long-tail keyword phrases, it is very possible to quickly make your presence felt in the top results of the major search engines. For complete guidance on how to apply the best on-page SEO techniques you should consult The Definitive On-Page SEO Handbook.

© Andy Smith 2008