The SIA recommends that you do a competitive analysis for a better reference of what type of page you need to build.
The above and below are the SIA’s “general” recommendation:
- 1000-1500 words
- only 1 h1 – that h1 contains the keyword
- meta title contains the keyword
- url contains the keyword, separated by dashes
- the h1 matches the meta title (without a brand mention that you probably have in the meta)
H2 – H4 should be all keyword variations (it’s probably ok for 1 h2 or 1 h3 to have the keyword exactly…but in speaking in generalities it’s hard to recommend even that)
Keep your hierarchy correct (don’t jump out of order on your h tags. H2s support the main idea of the H1, H3’s support the main idea of their H2s. For example:
H1 How to make taco shells
H2 Hard shell tacos
H3 Corn tortilla
H2 Soft shell tacos
H3 Flour tortilla
You’ll notice in the example above that the main keyword is: how to make taco shells. My H2s are variations of the keyword and my H3s are probably LSI)
- 1 exact match keyword for every 400 words of body copy
- 1 image with a keyword in the img alt. accurately describe the image and include the keyword in that description
- use open graph and twitter cards
- 1-2 total outbound links from the body copy (internal or external)
- Get a list of LSI words and just make sure some are on the page naturally
The above probably won’t get you in trouble and might even be helpful for weak keywords. We should have huge caveats on this that it’s not the secret to ranking but can get you started when putting a page together.