SEO - on page optimization

The search engines (SEs) are a catalogue of websites and you have to tell them how to catalogue your site correctly.

You have to tell the Ses what your site is about, what people may want when they come upon your site and whether it is better or worse than another site.
The following will let you know how you can achieve these objectives using only your pages.

The single, most important thing you can do to your web pages is to set up the title correctly. The page title appears in the top of your browser and in the search engine listing for that page. Look at the top left corner of your screen and there it is!

How to change the title.

The title tag is in the header section of your web page, contained in the title tag and can be edited like any other content.

• Titles should be unique for each page - do not use the same title for multiple pages


• Titles should be informative - they should give the reader a clear idea of what the page is going to be about


• Titles should grab your attention - remember that titles appear in the SERPs and can influence whether a searcher clicks on the link!


• DO NOT try to stuff as many search terms/keywords in the title as you can ... that may well result in trouble.


• Aim for a title of 65 characters - but longer titles may have an affect on ranking (google will display a maximum of 70 characters)

Meta Description Tags serve two purposes in the SERPs. They should include keyphrases, and encourage searchers to click the link to your web page.

It appears that the description does not have any direct relevance to SERPs in Google but may in other engines. It's main purpose is to "describe" your page to a searcher.

The description meta tag is in the header section of your web page, contained in the meta name="description" tag and can be edited like any other content.

The description you give a page is shown by search engines immediately below the page title. However it is possible that the SE will show a description as a snippet of information from the page or from a DMOZ description if available if that snippet is more relevant to the search.

• Descriptions may appear in the SERPs so try to make them grab attention


• Descriptions should be unique to each page and should be informative

It's now thought that the keywords meta tag serves no useful purpose to SERPs and it is probably worthwhile to completely leave it out.

Yahoo may check the tag for match with misspellings in searches.

Little by little I intend to go through all the options and am creating another lens to look at page content. As soon as it is complete I will post the link here, so please watch this space ...

If you absolutely can't wait then try the abbreviated version of on page optimisation on my blog.