On-Page Factors Dissected

Before we talk about the different strategies that we’re going to use in order for us to improve our rankings, we need to familiarize ourselves first with the on-page factors which will be crucial in building our strategy.  I’m talking about the different tags that are normally found in the upper section of our HTML page (as shown in Figure 1).  So, let’s dissect the different html tags and discuss how it will help us in our strategies. Here are some concepts from the Google Best Practices Guide by Jerry West.

 Figure 1

1. DTD Statement – It is the first tag on a webpage and we need to make sure to use the correct tag.  Codes written in HTML 3.2 might cause problems if HTML 4.01 is declared in our DTD statement.  For us to verify if we are using the correct tag, we can double check it in this site.  Testing shows that having this tag in place not only allows our site to load faster in major browsers, but also allows faster indexing.
2. Character Set Tag – This tag tells the browser how to display the text and this should be defined before any text appears in the browser.
3. Title Tag – The title tag is the text that users normally see at the top of the web browser window.  It is also the linked text in the search results of all major search engines.  All search engines index the Title tag, that’s why it is important for us to choose the proper title.  It is not advisable to place the company name in this tag because what we want is for our Title to grab attention, create curiosity, and evoke emotion to get customers to click on it.  Our Title must be brief and concise because Google will only display up to the first 65 characters.  Also, please take note not to use duplicate or near duplicate Titles across a site because it can harm a site’s ranking power.
4. Meta Description Tag – When users perform a search, the results displayed are usually the Title Tag and the Description Tag.  If a Description Tag was not supplied, by default, the browser will use the first 30-40 words on the page, which may be critical because those words may not accurately describe the services that our site offers.  Thus, we have to make sure that the content of our Description Tag contains our focused keyword phrases (we’ll discuss keyword phrases in my future entries).  We must also limit the content of our Description Tag to 165 characters or less.
5. Meta Keyword Tag – Use 6-8 keywords phrases in the Meta Keyword Tag but make sure not to include “money phrases” (highest converting phrases) because the Keyword Tag is the first place where competitors look to steal information and we do not want that to happen.  Please note that Google already stopped indexing this tag while Bing and Yahoo! are still indexing this.
6. Robots Tag – By default, the value is “index, follow”.  This means that the search engine will index the page and follow links on this page.  If we want our page to be indexed and followed by major search engines, it’s better not to include this tag because it makes no difference.  However, we may add this tag to pages which are not important for SEO like Contact Us, Privacy Policy, and Terms of Use pages by simply adding the tag and instead of “index, follow” value we use “noindex, nofollow” or a combination of the options.  Another way of doing this is by creating a robots.txt file.  To understand more about robots.txt, please visit this site.
7. Google Sitemap – This is the best way to get a site crawled and deeply indexed.  We’ll discuss more of this in my future entries.