SEO Essentials
#1 – Title Tags
The #1 most important place you do that is your title tags. There are some guidelines for title tags but they are a little fuzzy, so in some ways it’s as much an art as it is a science. The key is good keyword research and relevance. If you’re optimizing for phrases that have no bearing to the content on the page, you probably won’t succeed. If you optimize for what is actually on the page you do much better.
#2 – Content on the Page (Keyword Density)
You want to provide unique information, that means don’t copy and paste from Wikipedia if you want to rank. Put it in your own words if you want to have success online.
#3 – Meta Descriptions
This is what appears under your title tags in the search results. It should contain the same keywords as the title tags but expanded upon. This will allow you to rank for a few additional terms.
#4 – Heading Tags
These act as secondary title tags and will show up in search results when properly done.
#5 – Photographs, Banners, and Any Type of Image
If your images are optimized it can help you rank higher for search terms.
#6 – Geo Tags
This is something relatively new and too often overlooked. By providing your geographic location you do better in local searches.
#7 – Internal Linking
Linking key phrases within your own website. This tells the search engines that this is an important phrase for your site.
If you tie all of this together you will see an improvement in your rankings over time. On-Site SEO is not the end of the process by any means, it’s just telling the search engines what you want to show up for, yet in many cases it will get you first pages. For the more competitive terms there is more work needed.