A few months ago, SEOmoz, a provider of SEO software, surveyed 132 search engine professionals about SEO trends. I welcome you to view all of the survey results, but I want to direct you in particular to the 28th slide. This slide presents a ranking of the most important on-page SEO factors as voted on by these professionals. Keep in mind that a lower score indicates a higher ranking of importance.
I'm a big fan of on-page SEO because these are all tools you can use to get a leg up on your competition in organic search rankings. The top 2 most important ranking factors (as voted on by these professionals) actually relate to the same thing; your title tag. As you can see from the survey, your title tag is far and away the most important SEO tool you can have on your site. If you're not adding optimized title tags to your pages, it's as good of a time as ever to start! In fact, the second highest ranking factor involves the first words used in the title tag. We're actually in the process of evaluating all of our title tags ourselves on a2hosting.com.
Once you have your title tags in place, the next item you'll want to focus on is the anchor text you use when linking to the pages on your site. If you're linking to a page about "purple monkeys", don't use "click here" as the anchor text pointing to that page. Use "purple monkeys" as the anchor text!
If you're struggling with organic rankings, keep working your way down the list found on this slide and you should see a traffic boost in no time at all!
