There is a lot of talk out there about which practices are the best but it is all subjective hearsay and unless you compare and contrast techniques, it can be difficult to know what is objectively the best practices.
So, I recently undertook a peer review of the online SEO community, in order to determine what the consensus was about the best SEO practices. This involved finding 50 blogs about the best on page techniques, blogs ranged from top 5 and top 8’s to top 20’s and above. Then I counted the number of times a particular technique was mentioned. The results are detailed below:
| Technique | No. of SEO blogs |
| Content assessment: relevancy, authority, uniqueness, accurate information, keyword inclusion, user-optimised | 21 |
| Meta Data, Title Tags, Meta Description, Meta Keywords (optimise/de-optimise) | 18 |
| Heading/Body tags, H1, H2 & H3 | 14 |
| Rewrite the URL’s so they reinforce the main keyword on each page, whilst keeping urls user-friendly. Assess url structure. | 14 |
| Alt image tags | 13 |
| Generate and Submit XML and HTML Sitemap | 11 |
| Website file names and structure, including silo tree structure of home/category/product | 7 |
| Internal linking assessment, linking to all pages top-down. User-friendly navigation | 6 |
| Check server status: speed, authority, use on blacklisted sites | 6 |
| robots.txt assessment | 6 |
| Keyword Analysis: Keywords with traffic, keywords generating traffic, rankings | 5 |
| Blog platform installed onto the website | 5 |
| Usability and conversion assessment and implementation | 5 |
| Ensure 301 directs are in place for broken links or pages changed due to canonocalisation | 4 |
| Look at Canonocalisation issues and amend. Redirects (to www or non-www) or vice versa | 3 |
| Competitor Analysis | 3 |
| Check page load time: reduce images sizes and using caching | 3 |
| Keyword Analysis: On page optimisation/over-optimisation | 3 |
| Penalty assessment: Check for bad links, duplicate content, on page warning signs & past Google webmasters messages | 3 |
| Location optimisation for localised search results, including ge-targeting | 3 |
| Inclusion of call to actions | 3 |
| RSS Feed setup and optimisation | 2 |
| Google Analytics, Setting Up Goals | 2 |
| Cookies & Privacy statement; Set up correctly to retain “no” clickers | 1 |
| Requesting links to new pages or pages with new content | 1 |
| Spread keywords over multiple pages. Page-focus | 1 |
| Insertion of security pages/badges on payment pages | 1 |
| Title attribute on links | 1 |
| Regularly check keyword rankings | 1 |
| Social media share icons | 1 |
| Create a custom 404 page | 1 |
| Monitor unnatural linking to the homepage or deep pages | 1 |
So it seems that the majority of people have found content to be the most important factor, and in terms of on page factors I would seem to agree. Unless a page is relevant and specifically about a certain keyword then there’s no chance in hell of getting it to rank.