The next step in our local seo quick start guide is to take care of the "on-page factors".  I hate to even use that term because to a non-SEO, it's just jargon...so let's translate that.  The "on-page factors" are all of the elements of your site that affect your search engine ranking that.  Keep in mind that there are elements "off" of your site that also come into play, but for right now, we're only focused on changes we can make to the site itself to make it better.

Examples of Changes that Might Need to Be Made

First, I'm going to assume that you don't have any major technical issues related to your server or web hosting setup.  That's something that needs to be checked, but most likely, you won't have any of those issues.  Some other on-site changes that show up pretty frequently when a site needs SEO work done are:

• Title and description tags - these should be unique for each page of your site
• Text links vs. image links - links to the pages within your site should be done using text, not images and the text should include descriptive, keyword-rich words that describe the content of the page being linked to
• Fixing issues related to dynamic content - ecommerce sites are especially prone to this since they often have multiple ways of viewing the same content (e.g., links for sorting the order of products, viewing the printer-friendly version of a page, etc).  Since the content is often the same for each of these links, they should be no-followed to keep the search engines from adding duplicate versions of a page to their index
• Long URLs - again, with dynamic websites, long URLs can be a problem, especially if they use a session ID or any other element of the URL that changes each time you visit the same page.  This is another situation that can lead to duplicate content.  In addition, some experts believe that having keywords in your URL helps your rankings (the keywords for a particular search are highlighted in Google, even if they're in your URL).  Whether that's true or not, it's certainly better from a human visitor perspective since keyword-rich URLs can give the reader a sense of what's on that page before the click through.
• Content, Content, Content - You'll probably need to rewrite some of the existing content on  your site or add additional content in order to target a wider range of keywords that could bring you web traffic.
• Internal linking - linking to pages within your site can be beneficial from an SEO perspective since it passes link reputation and link authority between pages in your site.  This is another reason why it's better to have a larger site vs. a smaller site - more pages = more chances to add internal links and pass more authority to pages within your site.

These are just a few of the things that need to be considered when looking at on-page factors.  The good part is that most of the time, you generally only have to check through these items once.  Then, it's just a matter of making sure any additional pages you add are also optimized.

That leaves you more time to focus on getting links to your site, which is the next step in the process.