Cheatsheet for On-Page SEO (beginner level)
This post is far from authoritative - but it seems to work for me as a quick fix for SEO.
What I mean by SEO: showing up on google for search results without paying for it.
The basic things you need to do don't really need much web design skill.
KEYWORD
Pick a phrase you want to optimise for, e.g. "Business Growth Wexford"
PAGE TITLE
Add this in the title of your page - see the words that show in the browser tab? That's the page title - probably the most important thing.
H1 TITLE
On the actual text of your page, add your keyword in H1 - if this is part of a sentence, try to separate it from other words with a single character. (e.g. a comma,...)
H2 TITLE
Similar here add the word in h2 - usually your text editor has a button to select type of text (character/heading 1/heading 2/...)
BOLD
Add your phrase into the text in bold. Just the phrase - if it's part of a sentence, just make the phrase bold.
ITALIC
Similar here, add the phrase in italic. It might seem a bit unnatural to add the phrase so many times - try to figure out a way to make it seem more natural.
ALT-TAG FOR IMAGE
When you add an image to the page, you can add what's called an alt-tag (this means alternative - what the browser shows if it can't display images). If you don't have an image, add one!
SCHEMA DATA
This bit takes a bit of understanding and you can live without it. For more info, go to www.schema.org
LINKS OUT
Create a link somewhere on the page using your phrase, linked to another page.
LINKS IN
Create a link on another page with the same phrase that links in to your target page.
TAGS
Most blog software allows you to add tags - add your keyword as a tag.
CACHE
Switch on your cache to speed up your page, if you know how - be careful though - it can be messy. But speed is important.
OVER-OPTIMISING
Be careful about this: by now you probably have your keyword about 10-20 times on the page. If so, then you need about 500 - 1000 other words at least so that your keyword doesn't amount to too high a percentage of the text content.
INWARD LINKS
Of course you also want links coming from other websites linked to your page using that word, but they're a bit more difficult to get.
For example of this, my other site ranks number 1 currently for "Web Design Wexford", mostly because of inbound links from important websites.
For an example of this simple on-page optimisation, search for "Business Growth Wexford" and see one of my blogs there number 1. It was number 1 after 5 minutes of posting, mainly because no-one else optimising for it.
Anything I have left out here?