There are many on-the-page factors that affect search engine ranking and your search engine visibility. Some of the most important factors are explained below, by making good use of these you could increase your search visibility and improve your search engine ranking in the major search engines.
YOUR TITLE (THE <TITLE> TAG) – It sounds stupid but your title tag should reflect the content of your page, it is essential that each and every page of your site has a title tag. When considering your title your should try place your keywords as close to the beginning as possible, also try to limit the number of waste words (to, and, the, in etc) that you use.
YOUR HEADINGS (THE <H1> – <H6> TAGS) – Headings are there for a reason, to give a brief summary of what the following text is about. Various search engines treat your heading tags in different ways but even so each and every page of your site should contain at least one heading. When composing your heading try and keep it brief and to the point, close to the beginning is the best place for your keyword in your heading.
WHAT YOU PUT IN BOLD (THE <B> TAG) – A very simple trick and yet one which can aid both your human reader and the search engines alike, use the bold tag sparingly and only when it really is needed. By making your keyword part of a bold phrase once on your page it adds extra emphasis to that phrase in the eyes of the search engines. Of course it also helps anybody who could be skim reading your page to pick out what is important.
YOUR USE OF THE ALT ATTRIBUTE – The golden rule here is that every image on every page of your site should contain an alt attribute for browsers that can not display images. You can take advantage of this attribute and add your keyword to it. The most important images are the first three on your page so this is where you should be looking first. Remember though that the search engines (especially MSN) will penalise you for using your alt attributes for spam purposes. You should avoid stuffing keywords into alt attributes and only use where appropriate.
Of course there is a whole lot more to webpage search optimisation that the above but it should give you something to think about. At the end of the day the search engines are always talking about good original content as the best way of ranking well, and they are right. However there is a lot of very good original informative content on the internet that will never be found simply because it is presented on a page that is not search engine friendly, we’re not talking about spamming the search engines, we are talking about adding/removing/altering elements of your page to aid both the search engines and your human readers, that is the real key to webpage search optimisation.