Ranking well in a search engine means ranking well for a particular search term, or keyword, like “SEO Tips” or “Marketing Ideas.”
Determine your keyword, and on-page optimization becomes a step-by-step process of making sure that keyword and its variations are strategically placed in a few HTML elements of the web page, such as:
1. Title tags. The title of an individual web page, in HTML terms, is called a title tag (or sometimes an HTML title). It not only shows up with a larger font at the top of the article, but also appears as the blue underlined link you click on in search engines. This is the most important on-page factor to manage.
2. Meta descriptions. This is considered an “on-page” element because it’s in the page’s HTML, but it’s not visible to the person reading the website; it’s metadata that describes the page in summary form. The meta description is usually one or two sentences long. While keywords placed in a meta description tag aren’t indexed like the keywords in the title or article, the text that appears in this description shows up in the SERPs, right after the HTML title.
3. Headers. Keywords in the post title and subheadings are given slightly more weight by search bots than keywords in article paragraphs. It would be hard to write a blog post about a topic without putting a few keywords about that topic in the title and subheadings, so the bots pick up on these elements to determine how the post should be indexed.
4. Alt text. Alternate text is used to embed the text equivalent of an image on a web page for the visually impaired (text-tospeech
software can read it aloud) and for search engines. Some webmasters have reported sizeable boosts in their search traffic after making their alt text more specific, such as “Afforable SEO Cheap Packages” instead of just “SEO Packages.”
