What Matters On-Page

There are five elements that really matter to the On-Page optimization process.  Are these the only five things? Of course not.  But if you can handle these five basic things and do them properly then you will see a solid return and are probably 80-90% optimized.  Of these five, there are three that are most important so let’s discuss them first.

Page Titles

 Page Titles are the single most important SEO element on a page.  Most people don’t pay attention to them because they aren’t an element that we spend a lot of time looking at. But  page titles are EXTREMELY important for search results.  The page title is the title of the search result and if it’s not relevant or says something as basic as “HOME” then how is this going to convince people to click on it at all?Page titles should have relevant keywords (relevant means describing what this page is about) while also being no longer than 70 characters (because this is the limit that will show up in search results).  Try and get the important keywords to the front of the title, and if there is room it’s perfectly ok to stick the name of the site at the end.  The page title should tell me what THIS page is about and should be convincing in order to stand out in a long list of search results.

Optimized URLs

From a usability standpoint describing what the page is about in the URL can help someone figure out what they are clicking on when you send the link to someone through an email.  It also is the only way that a search engine will know what the page is about from the URL.  You definitely want to keep it short and friendly, but having a few relevant keywords can go a long way towards ranking for those keywords.  This is one of those things that most Content Management Systems (CMS) just suck at doing right.  Having a long URL of a bunch of random characters that a database can read in order  to pull unique content might work, but it doesn’t tell anyone what the article is about.

Header Elements

If you haven’t heard of semantic markup then it’s definitely worth spending some time reading about it.  Anyway what we are talking about here is specifically H1, H2, H3, and H4 HTML elements on a page.  This means that your page title shouldn’t simply be bold but actually wrapped in Header tags and the same for subsections.  Think of a word document that asks you to use Header elements. It is the same idea here.  In fact all the sections of this document are in various levels of header elements.  For those designers out there it’s as simple as setting up CSS to style the various header elements as you see fit.

Meta Keywords and Meta Description

The final two elements are the meta elements on the page, meta keywords and meta description.  Although Google currently does not even look at meta keywords because of their nature to be abused, it is still a best practice and if they were to decide to start looking at meta keywords again you will be ahead of the game with minimal work to do.
 Meta descriptions on the other hand are still used and can help people decide to click on your listing in the search results.  They don’t always show up, but if it is appropriate it can be what convinces people to click on your result and not the one above or below it.  Be sure to get your keywords in the description and do not go overboard.  One or two sentences are plenty and no more than 150 or so characters.

Introduction – What Is SEO

Whenever you enter a query in a search engine and hit 'enter' you get a list of web results that contain that query term. Users normally tend to visit websites that are at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the query. If you have ever wondered why some of these websites rank better than the others then you must know that it is because of a powerful web marketing technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO is a technique which helps search engines find and rank your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query. SEO thus helps you get traffic from search engines.


Search engine optimization is a methodology of strategies, techniques and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine (SERP) -- including Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.
SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine.

It is common practice for Internet users to not click through pages and pages of search results, so where a site ranks in a search is essential for directing more traffic toward the site. The higher a website naturally ranks in organic results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user.
SEO is typically a set of "white hat" best practices that webmasters and Web content producers follow to help them achieve a better ranking in search engine results.