There are two general segments of Search Engine Optimization: On-Page and Off-Page. Off Page factors pertain to activities that are not visible on the website, such as back linking. The majority of the weight search engines gives to a website is in accordance with off-page factors however proper on-page design still does contribute about 20% of the weight. So how should you maximize this 20% for the best possible results? Probably the most important on-page factor is the title tag. It is imperative that this tag includes your website’s most important key phrase. Be sure you do the necessary keyword research to determine a highly relevant phrase for your business that isn’t too competitive among other websites. For example if your website is based in New Jersey and sells car insurance, a highly competitive phrase, you may discover that “Car Insurance in New Jersey” has a good ratio of high search volume and low competition. This would be an ideal term to include in the title tag for this type of website.

On-Page Optimization doesn’t stop there. The next thing you should do would be to incorporate semantically related phrases in the Meta Keyword tag and Meta Description tag. Meta tags have a variable degree of significance in Search Engine Optimization these days. Google doesn’t put to much emphasis on Meta tags as they used too but because it was too easy too spam these tags to trigger multiple keywords on the same page. However Yahoo and MSN still put some significance in these tags. Another important HTML tag is the H1, or header tag. Using an H1 tag can further dictate the relevance of your webpage to search engines. Natural use of H1 tags will produce a larger sized font and may be unattractive to some websites. Fortunately this can be controlled with CSS. You can use a style sheet to format the font size of an H1 tag to 12 point font to blend in with the rest of the body text. Be sure not to use more then one H1 tag per page or you may be penalized by Google for spam.

Metas, Headers and Title Tags will help search engines define the content of your site, but how should you write the copy to your webpage to get the most out of these tags? If we go back to the car insurance example, we can write our body text in way to keep a keyword density of 3-5%. Keyword density is simply the keyword you are targeting divided by number of words on the webpage. If I use the term “car insurance” 5 times on the webpage that has 100 words, then I am keeping a keyword density of 5%. Keyword density if important for SEO purposes because a low percentage may indicate to search engines that your keyword isn’t that relevant to your page and a high keyword density looks like spam for a search engines point of view.

You should always try to target one main keyword per webpage and one smaller term. Each webpage of your site has a specific focus so it is critical to let search engines know how relevant each topic is. The narrower your niche, the better.