What exactley is on-site SEO? am i doing it right?

to be honest, SEO does confuse the Fuc* out of me, but its still early days..

I know that there is onsite and offiste seo.. I am only working on onsite for my site currently..

These are the steps that i follow when attempting onsite SEO:

1 - research on jaaxy for medium traffic keywords with low QSR and high Seo Power
2 - Add the keyword to title of article and some headers in article, aswell as in main content.. don't do keyword density, but i'd reckon its 1 - 3% max..
3 - add keyword to image titles and alt descriptions
4 - add rel="nofollow" to external links
5- add some internal links to the article
5 - use all in one SEO to add better page title, page description, keywords etc..

is this correct and should I be doing more?

thanks BHW, you always help me out..

I hear ya man, seo can be seriously confusing if you read too much into it (guilty as charged, lol). For on page seo, do this:
1. Make the article relevant and something people searching for would genuinely find useful - putting in keywords etc. will naturally follow.
2. Don't keyword-stuff. Work you main keyword into the title ALONG WITH some other words. If your keyword was 'lose weight fast' your title would be '10 easy tips to lose weight fast', for example.
3. As for the main body of the article, write it as if you were the one reading it and judge it based on whether it helps you. If you can't get a keyword on the page, don't force it! Write naturally targeted content for the reader.
4. Use LSI in things like description - note, this will happen naturally as you write an article.
5. Don't bother putting your keyword in things like alt text, makes little to no difference and may comes across spammy. Just write what the picture shows. If it's related to the content (and it should be)then you'll get the right stuff in there anyway.
6. Yes, Internally link to other pages throughout your site. This helps link juice flow and site navigation. Use wikipedia as an example, great interlinking structure.
7. Link out to an authority site. This helps you appear natural to the search engines and shows you as part of the 'circle of trust' (for lack of a better term).

That's it. Don't over complicate it

thank you,

Yeah i have not been forcing keywords in at all, i have found that my most popular article on google was the first article i ever made and i didn't do any deliberate seo at all

ok, i will stop adding keywords to alt desc, only started doing it yesterday anyway..

just one question though, what is is LSI?

LSI is Latent Semantic Indexing. It is when Google associates a certain word with other similar words. An example is car and one of many LSI words would be automobile and vehicle/motor vehicle. The search engine groups them all into one meaning.

Edit:
btw thanks jamesjk1 that post helped me out as I am about to start article writing.

ok, thanks, that is very good to know indeed

Yep, all ya gotta do is make it relevant, high quality and targeted to your audience -that's it. LSI stand for latent symantec indexing, read about it here. It's not SUPER important, but can help you rank for more keywords. Don't stress about it though, just get the basics right, as I wrote above, and you'll be sweet

EDIT: No problem, TragikGod. Glad to help out

sorry, double post

On page SEO is not that complicated and the rules seldom change.

There are only two types of tags that help ranking in Google: Title and headings.

The title should be about 70 characters max. What you want to promote should be in the beginning of the title.

"East End carpet cleaning - best carpet cleaners in Houston" focuses the targeting of the title in this way:

1. Primary focus, first thing listed, brand name-East End.

2. Secondary targeting is keywords:
carpet cleaning
carpet cleaning best
best carpet cleaners
carpet cleaners
carpet cleaning houston
carpet cleaners houston

3. Tertiary focus: location- Houston.

So you can see that it is possible to "optimize" the title itself. If you want to focus on the keyword, use it first. If you are brand building, use it at the beginning, if you are geo locking, use location first.

The description tag is not used for ranking, but the words count as page content. Keyword stuffing the desc tag will keyword stuff your page.

While the description tag is not a part of on page SEO, it is still very important. It is essentially an ad that google runs for your site when it appears in the SERPs. Treat it like an AD.

Description should be 160 characters long (if it is too long, it will get chopped off), and if you are a small business or driving phone traffic with your site, the description should end with a call to action and a phone number.

"Call us today! (XXX) XXX-XXXX"

This is so customers who are just looking for your phone number do not have to actually load the page to get it, they can call you directly from the SERP's page.

The keyword tag is ignored, but the contents of the keyword tag count as page content, as above.

All other tags are markup tags now, and do not contribute to SEO. Use bold and italics when it helps your reader, not for SEO. <strong> and <b> are the same thing now, whereas <strong> used to be a content tag and <b> was a markup tag, even though they do the same thing in the displayed text.

People do not really understand what LSI is. It is simply words that are found on many sites that are similar to yours. If you have a bakery site, it will have bakery terms on it like other bakery sites. If you analyze the top pages and find they are using terms you are not using, adding these LSI terms to your page will probably rank your page higher. These are terms Google thinks are relevant to sites within your niche.

Alt text optimization is another area that can really help your on page if it is optimized, or hurt it if it isn't. Alt text is supposed to tell a visitor hat the image is about in case the image doesn't load or if they are visually impaired and use a reader.

If the picture is a logo, then name it "keyword logo". However if it is a young lady in a corset, instead of saying "lady in a corset" you should optimize the tag for SEO and the reader, and here is where Google gives you leeway. Use something like "Model wearing black lace corset from Wicked Temptations new fall 2014 line".

This alt tag gives your reader a much better idea of what is in the picture,and if you get a manual review, the alt tag makes perfect sense for the reader who does not see the image. In this case, this alt tag is optimized.

What you cannot do is take a pic of a model in a corset, and alt tag it "keyword logo". That is not what is in the image, and a manual review will ding you for it. In this case, this alt tag is not optimized.

Internal linking is important and the nav takes care of that , but you can do a lot more internal linking than just nav.

Have you ever read a news story about for instance a whale rescue, and you see a link on the page that says "Click for more whale rescues" or "Related story, man helps whale out of fish net"?

These are related internal links. There are incredibly effective for helping rank internal pages, and you should use them to call attention to any pages on your site that are related to the page you are writing. DO THIS INSTEAD OF HAVING RELATED POSTS IN A SIDEBAR.

There is far more to optimizing a web page than making sure the components are there. These components need to be optimized.

Forget keyword density, write naturally. I have a page on a site about hard drive failure that has the word "hard drive" at 45 %, page still ranks.

Just contributing to the conversation.

I could go on about content and headings, but this is already a TL;DR post as is.

What I do on on page seo

1. Handwritten article for at least 300 words.
2. Keyword in URL, first and last paragraph (I keep on first and last sentence)
3. H1, h2, h3 tags for keyword as well as bold, italic and underline.
4. Keyword density between 1%-3%
5. Interlinking between other pages using their anchor text and at least one outbound link.
6. At least one relevant picture with keyword alt on it.
7. If possible I keep one video as well.
8. Tag the keyword (I use WP).
9. Specify the meta description, keywords and seo title.

Great guide here (not mine): http://source-wave.com/seo-penalties-guide/

James i completely agree with you. Especially 2nd and 7th point i like very much.
Because if we want to target one keyword means, we can create a new post and post it in our internal blog which is creative title (According to humming Bird - conversational search)
Tips to reduce the "lose weight fast" / How to reduce the weight fast.
For this post we can get the backlink from authority sites, and do tier 2 (with unique content) & social Shares for that authority backlink Surely we attain the traffic to our website.

Well you got the points right basically you need to choose your keywords wisely and make them related as much as possible to your chosen niche, also it would be better if the keyword your targeting is on the pages of your website. Another on-page seo is adding the keywords to your header titles. and using only one header for header no., as for images always use alt tags on every image. and lastly I strongly suggest interlinking to maximize your site's overall usability and also increase your page authority.

You could also use markup if your article is a review or recipe for example. There is a plugin for Wordpress which allows the addition of this schema markup. It doesn't really improve the SEO of the page but it does help with CTR in the serps.

I think the question has been properly addressed by jamesjk1 and Techxan, so learn from them and dont confuse yourself.

Most importantly for Panda's algo is to have fresh unique content and not the 300 words that some have said as that will appear like a thin site and Google wants to see a minimum of 800 words on the homepage and it's best to have that amount on all pages and not 300 words of content on blog posts.