1. Title Tag Near the very top of a web site’s source code you’ll find various meta tags — the standard ones being the Title, Description and Keyword tags. The title tag is technically not a meta tag, though it is commonly associated with them. The title tag plays such a large role in the indexing of your web site, that it is considered the most important of the three. A page title is the first thing a search engine will look at when determining just what the particular page is about. It is also the first thing potential visitors will see when looking at your search engine listing. 2. Meta Tags There are two primary meta tags in terms of SEO — the description and the keyword tag. It’s debatable whether the search engines use the description tag as far as ranking your results. However it is one of the more important tags because it is listed in your search result — it is what users read when your link comes up and what makes them decide whether or not to click on your link. Be sure to include a few relevant keywords in this tag, but don’t stuff it with keywords either. The description tag should read like a sentence — not a keyword list. Due to “keyword stuffing†many search engines now completely disregard the keyword tag. It is no longer nearly as important as it was years ago, however it doesn’t hurt to include them in your source code. 3. Proper Use of Heading Tags This is a very important element to consider when writing out your site copy. Use of heading tags helps users, web browsers and search engines alike know where the major key points of your copy are. Your main page title should use the <h1> tag — this shows what your page is about. Use of additional tags, such as <h2> and <h3> are equally important by helping to break down your copy. For one, you’ll see a visual break in the text. But as far as the search engines are concerned, it will automatically know what your topics are on a page. The various heading tags give a priority to the content and help index your site properly. 4. Alt Attributes on Images Putting alt attributes on your images actually serves two purposes. In terms of SEO, putting a brief yet descriptive alt attribute along with your image, places additional relevant text to your source code that the search engines can see when indexing your site. The more relevant text on your page the better chance you have of achieving higher search engine rankings. 5. Title Attributes on Links Including title attributes on links is another important step that any good web site will have. That’s the little “tool tip†that pops up when you place your mouse over a link. These are especially important for image links, but equally useful for text links. 6. XML Sitemap My last post referenced the sitemaps used by web visitors to help them navigate through your site themselves. However, there’s another version — XML sitemaps — that are used by the search engines in order to index through your site, as well. This list of ALL pages / posts / etc. of your site also includes information such as the date the page was last modified, as well as a priority number of what you feel the most important pages of your sites are. All elements that help the search engines properly find and link to all content of your site. 7. Relevant Content Having content relevant to your main page or site topic is perhaps the most important SEO aspect of a page. You can put all the keywords you want in the meta tags and alt image tags, etc — but if the actual readable text on the page is not relevant to the target keywords, it ends up basically being a futile attempt. 8.Social Media Although technically not SEO, Social Media is such a growing factor in getting your web site noticed, that it’s an important element to include in your plan. Social media ranges from social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn — to social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon and many more. There is a lot of relationship building involved, but as you build your own networks and build quality content on your web site or blog, you’ll see traffic to your web site increasing, as well.
Great info in here. This is a very important part of S.E.O. and I truly believe (of course, depending of the competitor's number) that you can rank well/very well just by implementing a very good On Site Optimization.
Good info you covers all basic points here but i am confused on last point Social media is not part of on page optimization i think it's off page activities...
Yes, it is more in the OFF "area". However, community is a very important part of what we're doing here - you can trick the engines (a.k.a. Angela Edwards) but you can't trick the users.
great information above about the basics of SEO, it will be very helpful to all members of DP who want to learn about the seo without any cost excluding time
Great share, but i think you missed the important part, that is to have your targeted keyword placed in your URL