There are a lot of elements to “On Page Search Engine Optimization” and there are people that will tell you that you don’t need on page optimization as long as you have back links.

Guess what that is bull!

Before you even think about getting back links you should be doing on page optimization. On page optimization includes things like:

1. Keyword density
2. Meta Tag keywords
3. Meta Tag Description
4. Title Tag
5. Keyword Prominence
6. Font Characteristics (H tags, bold, etc.)
7. Domain Name (this one is overlooked a lot)

All of these elements (except one) will help with your search engine rankings but one had more ranking power in the major search engines and one doesn’t even come into play with the major search engines. Do you know which is which?

Let’s start with the one that doesn’t really matter anymore.

Meta Tag Keywords – This is a tag that you put in the head section of your web page that lists all the keywords that you want to be indexed for. Sounds like it would be something that you would want on your website, doesn’t it? But the truth in the matter is because of abuse of this tag all the major search engines have stopped reading this tag. They now just read the content on your page. I haven’t used this tag in about 3 years and I can still get #1 ranking in Google.

Meta Tag Description – This is, again, a tag you put in the head section of your web page that describes the page itself. You would think this is a good spot for your keywords and it is but the search engines don’t put too much weight on this anymore either. But in a lot of the search engines this is what the searcher will see when you turn up in the SERP’s (Search Engine Response Pages) and if it has the keywords they searched in the text they are more likely to click on your link, which is a good thing, but it doesn’t help much with your actual ranking.

Font Characteristics – This is your font settings such as a H1 tag or a bold. This does help a little with your on page search engine optimization but not a lot. What it boils down to is that if you have a page that ends up with the same score as another page in the search engines. If you have your keywords in H1 tags and they have theirs in H2 tags with everything else being equal you will rank higher then them. All characteristics have some value rating to them but the heading tags (H tags) have the most effect.

Keyword Prominence – Prominence is how visible something is. Keyword prominence is how visible your keywords are. Remember search engines don’t see a page the same way you and I do. They only see the text of the code. The higher up in this code your keywords are the more prominent they are to the search engines. The more prominent your keyword is to the search engines the more relevant it seems to the algorithm.

Keyword Density – You constantly hear about this. Keyword density is how many times your keywords show up in the text on the page compared to how many words are on the page. For example if you are using a one word keyword phrase and you have it on your page 5 times and you only have 20 words your keyword density would be 25%. Let me tell you right now that there is no specific density that you should shoot for. All the search engines compare the keyword density of all the pages that turn up for that keyword and average it out. If you are too high you get penalized, if you are too low you might not rank. But your back links can help you if you are too low but they won’t help you if you are too high. The key here is to just write what comes naturally and you should end up with a decent density.

Title Tag – This is the most important place to have your keywords. At least for now, as more and more people start to spam this tag the search engines will do like they have done with all the other tags and make it not that important anymore. But at the time of this writing this was the most important place to have your keywords. You should put the main keyword for your page at the very beginning of the title tag.

The Domain Name – This is something that is overlooked by a lot of people. But the way the search engines see it is that if you are going to pay for a domain that has the keywords in the name you must plan the site to be about that keyword. For the search engines it doesn’t matter if your keywords are run together in the domain name (it does make a difference in the page and folder names) or if you have hyphens between the words but you have to watch out for the possibility of creating different words. I registered a domain marketerstool.com and this can be taken either as Marketers Tool or Marketer Stool. If it would have had hyphens it could only be interpreted one way.

To give you an idea about what this can do I have a domain Marketing Beginners that I didn’t do any real optimization for, I didn’t create a back link campaign for it, I didn’t create a sitemap for it, I just put it up and put Marketing Beginners in the title tag and it became #1 in Google, MSN, Yahoo! and Ask for the keyword marketing beginners on its own in a very short period of time. The site is now over a year old and it has naturally grown some back links but since the beginning I have been getting visitors from the search engines.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 10:59 am and is filed under SEO . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.