Page Title Tags:
Search engines rely on spiders to crawl websites and index pages appropriately. When a spider (otherwise referred to as a crawler) lands on your website, the first thing they take notice of is your domain name and your website's title tag.
A title tag should include a description of what your website is about, rather than just including your website's URL, you should always incorporate your primary keyword phrase into the title tags of each webpage you own.
Example: Instead of just calling your index page "Your Domain Name", include your primary keyword.
The title tag can be found in the head area of your HTML document, so you’ll need to look in the source code of your HTML file to edit this area.
You want to make sure that you use different title tags on every single web page, that way you are able to rank for different terms rather than just one.
You want each page title to carry a different keyword phrase, so that you are able to rank for various phrases within the search engines.
Header Tags
Header Tags also play an important part in search engine optimization, because by using head tags within your website's content, you are able to highlight important text on your website, ensuring that search engine spiders pay special attention to the text contained within these head tags.
And because you also want to be able to showcase specific text to your website visitors, such as headlines, or bullet points, using head tags helps you emphasize important information found on your website.
Another very important element to SEO is including a site map on your website. What a site map does is helps both visitors and search engine spiders navigate their way throughout your pages and categories, by outlining all of the different areas of your site.
Next, you will want to include a meta description that includes important information regarding your website. Meta descriptions provide a summary to those visiting your website from the search engines but also help spiders identify what your website is about.
You should also use the <h1> tag throughout your pages. H1 instructs search engine spiders to pay particular attention to text located within the tags, and also helps visitors identify important areas of your site.
Another very important element to SEO is including a site map on your website. What a site map does is helps both visitors and search engine spiders navigate their way throughout your pages and categories, by outlining all of the different areas of your site.
You can create a sitemap very easily by using free services such as:
http://www.XML-Sitemaps.com
When it comes to developing your content so that you are optimizing your website for the search engines, you should pay attention to keyword proximity, prominence as well as the order of your content itself.
The prominence of your keyword is based on the first instance of where it appears within your content. A keyword phrase that is used at the end of your content will be considered less relevant than a keyword phrase that appears in the first portion of your content or article.
This means that you need to ensure that you implement your primary keyword phrases into the first half of your content, so that it is given more weight when search engine spiders index your website.
Keyword proximity is also very important in terms of search engine rankings because it indicates to the search engines that these keywords are related to one another.
For example, if you search for the keyword phrase 'dog training tips' in www.Google.com you will pull up listings of websites that include the keyword phrase 'dog training tips'.
Without quotations, all websites that feature the keyword dog, training and tips seperately will also appear in your search results.
Since you want to rank for specific phrases, rather than just individual keywords, you need to do your best to focus on close keyword proximity, so that search engine spiders crawling your website index entire phrases rather than singular keywords.
Anchor Text & Tags
Anchor text is also exceptionally important in search engine optimization.
With anchor text, you are describing a link, whether it is internal (one page linking to another) or external (where you link to an outside website).
Example: A regular link would look like this: www.your-website-url.com but an anchor text based link would look like this: Your Keyword Phrase
Anchor text is important because it allows you to rank for specific keywords, rather than just for your main website's URL.
When creating internal and external links, you always want to do your best to focus on including your primary keyword phrases, and that you vary the text used so that you are able to rank for different keyword phrases, rather than just one.
This is exceptionally important with off-site SEO when creating back links for your website as well.