This article lists the 5 first things you should do for on-page seo to get your page floating on top of the competition when you start a new blog or website. On-page SEO means the things you are doing are on your own website, and not on other websites, such as creating links with the correct keywords, which is called off-site SEO.
This list assumes you already thought about WHAT you’re website or blog is going to be about, and, that you’ve thought about the keywords you are going to target for.
1. Get yourself a domainname
Preferably a dotcom domain, but other topleveldomains are ok, such as .net or .org.
Try to have one or two of your keywords in your domainname, but also try to keep your domainname short enough for people to remember. If you cannot go for the keywords in the domain, then go for a great and catchy domainname, make it something people will not forget, maybe even something funny.
2. Page titles
Watch your page titles very closely! These are the single most important SEO items to work on. The page title is the text that will appear in the titlebar of the browserwindow and is also the first thing (of many) that a search engine uses to determine what the content of your page is about. In Google, it is also the title of the entry of your page, the topline of your entry. This makes people decide to click on your link or on someone else link. Check out this search: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=icant+internet to see what I mean.
Two things to keep in mind for your titles: do not start with your domainname or websitename! The search engines know where they are, and so do your visitors, no need to remind them. You can add it, but to it after the pagetitle, not in front of the pagetitle.
Use the keywords for that page in your title, but don’t stuff it! Never ever overdo your keywords! Keyword stuffing will make your website and your articles look very spammy, and you will be punished for it by the search engines.
3. Meta tags
There are two metatags important for SEO purposes: the DESCIPTION tag, and the KEYWORDS tag. There is alot of discution in the SEO world as to how important the description meta tag is for search engines. But, besides that possible importance, there is the secondary effect, that the description is often used by search engines as the description of your website in their resultlistings. Make sure your description contains your keywords, but again, don’t stuff it.
Due to this keyword stuffing, the importance for seo matters of the keyword meta tag has diminished enormously the past few years. However, Google, and the other search engines are constantly updating their algorithms. It is very well possible that when they notice improvement of the stuffing, they’ll “up” the value of the meta tag again. There is no harm whatsoever including it.
4. Heading tags – In-page titles
The heading tags (H1, H2, H3, which are the different html content title tags) play a very important role in Google’s search spider to determine the structure and the topic of your webpage. So, make sure you structure your page well, make sure your keywords are in these header tags, and setup your page in such a way, that one can see what the page is about, by only reading the text between the header tags.
5. Use the ALT attribute in your IMG tags
Google can do alot. Really, a whole lot! But it can’t yet see what’s in a picture. So you need to tell it that, via the ALT attribute of the IMG tag. This will make Google use the images too in it’s consideration of your pagerank and search engine result page position (now that is quite a term isn’t it? 
).
Related posts:
- Important facts about keywords Important facts about keywords Keywords and phrases...
- Top 10 SEO things NOT to do 1. Hide text Using the same colors,...
- How to Find Popular Keywords for Search Engine Optimization Search engine optimization is the practice of...
- Google Adsense Tips Nr 1. Keywords Your keywords are very...
- Get your tweets in Google A few weeks ago (on October 21...
Great tips for starters, the meta description can actually backfire sometimes if it’s not written correctly. On most of my sites main keywords receive less traffic than long tail keywords. At the same time my meta description is more often geared towards main keywords. It’s good that search engines are smart enough to pick relevant snippets from the document but sometimes they just show the meta description and I think that results in loss of visitors.
BTW, I don’t know why most people omit this, but it’s a really great idea to use strong once or twice to highlight the keywords in a page. It’s also good to use title tags for images and anchors.
Thanks for the extra info here Jeet! You are very right, using the strong or the i (italic) tags can also help in identifying your keywords. For this article however, I limited the list to 5 items. In regards to images and achors, it is indeed very good practice to also add title tags next to the alt tag for images.
I am not really sure about italics
And I agree, list of 5 items sounds more rounded 
)
Is that a wordle tag cloud?
The tagcloud is the WP-Cumulus plugin. I love the way it looks
Excellent tips. Thank you for sharing! I certainly agree with your thoughts regarding page titles. They should be well though out – and not just slapped onto your nice blog post. If you take time to come up with a good post – take the time to craft a good title.
Very true… And besides the SEO effects, a good title draws in readers. Same as with a book. You do not read a whole book to decide if you’re gonna read it. You judge it by its title!
All are very nice and essential SEO tips. Page titles and meta tags both are important in SEO for on page side. A good page title always gets visitors.
Thanks for agreeing Mr Mirror
Very Nice!!!
I don’t know if meta keywords tag is important anymore. From what i read in other places google doesn’t “use” that tag anymore.
Anyway, a good post for SEO beginners.
Again, nice article. What do you think of a WordPress plug-in such as All in One SEO Pack? I recently added this to my site and see if it would help.
@Julio: Well, actually, I love All-in-one-SEO-Pack. I have it installed on this blog, and it is one of the standard plugins I ALWAYS install when installing a new blog! I think it is a must have plugin, it really helps getting your blog out there in the SERP’s.
Hi everyone; we recently set up this blog and don’t have a clue what we are doing. I am reading all your great ideas and it is like a foreign language to me. I should mention that our site is French cos our business is here in France. Rotin means cane in English. Would any lovely person take a look at the blog and tell me what I should do to improve it…..Merci beaucoup.
what does my comment is awaiting moderation mean?
@fiona: it means I have to approve your comment, in order to avoid spamming
Hi admin, thanks for the explanation. I thought the name of my blog would come up with the message; see how green I am ‘puterwise!
The blog is called rotin attitude exodia, not sure if you have to select French as your language to see it. Any help gratefully received.
Thanks again; fiona
I think you should update tip 3, because the search engines don’t look at the keywords tag anymore. Google for a couple of years now and Yahoo! declared it a couple of weeks ago.
@MaykelvL Thanks for mentioning. I’ve been looking into this, but haven’t yet been able to find an announcement of it. Do you happen to have a link to it?