There is no such thing as a perfectly optimised website. However, there are certain elements of our web pages which we can optimise which will help our chances of showing up in the search engines.
As discussed before, the search engine algorithms are a deeply guarded secret so we won’t ever know how much importance Google places on different elements of code on your page.
However, there are some elements of a Hyper Text Markup Langauge (HTML) page that are time tested and proven to help your rankings in the search engines – affectionately known as on-site optimisation.

The <title> tag

The text between the title tags of your HTML page shows up in the windows bar at the top of your browser. The title tag is arguably the most important aspect of your on-site optimisation and if you get this part right, you can sometimes show up in Google without having to do anything else – depending on how competitive the key phrase is that you are trying to rank for. For example, if for some obscure reason you had a site about underwater knitting patterns, and you had that key phrase in your title tag, then in a few weeks you would most likely show up on the first page of Google for that term. Of course, the reason for this is because there is no one else in the world trying to compete for this key phrase as no one would be searching for it. But if you can find a key phrase that does get some searched and has little to no competition, optimising your title tag may be all that you had to do.

So couldn’t you just put 50 keywords in the title tag? No. the search engines will see this as spamming. You want to try and put your top 3 keywords in your title tag.

Here is an example of what you shouldn’t do:

<title>Harry’s Website About Mortgages</title>

It should look more like this:

<title>Impartial Mortgage Advice | How To Remortgage | Free Mortgage Tips</title>

You don’t have to use the pipe character ‘|’ you can also use commas.

The <meta> tags

Meta tags are similar to the title tag in that they help tell the search engines what your site is about.
They should be located in your HTML code at the top of the page immediately after the close-title tag (</title>).

There are many different meta tags you can include in your code but we suggest that you only include the following three:

Keywords

The keywords meta tag will look something like this in your HTML code:

<META NAME=”KEYWORDS” CONTENT=”mortgage advice for free remortgage help and advice how to remortgage your home refinancing your house impartial free mortgage advice”>

There is some debate about how this meta tag should be structured on your site, and even whether Google looks at this any more. But in our experience it is still worth including.
We are constantly testing this metric and it our recommendation that you only include 5 – 10 of your broad keywords in this tag, and no more than 15.
Most webmasters will separate the keywords in this tag with a comma, from our testing we have seen that just separating the words with a space is more affective. By having the keywords like this: impartial free mortgage advice you will be hitting all variations e.g. ‘free mortgage advice’, ‘mortgage advice’, as well as the individual words themselves.

Description

This meta tag is very important as it is the 250 character piece of text that is shown on most search engines about your site. This is where you need to ‘sell’ your site to get people to click on it in the results page of the search engine. This is another area where you want to include your top 3 keywords but in a conversational manner this time.

<META NAME=”DESCRIPTION” CONTENT=”Henry’s impartial mortgage advice site will give you free mortgage tips on how to remortgage your home and how to refinance your house.”>

So long as you make it conversational so that you inject some of your personality into it, and include your top 3 keywords then yo should be in good shape with the content meta tag.

Robots

You only really need to worry about the robots meta tag if you have a page that you wouldn’t want to show up in Google. For example, if you run a membership site where people have to pay to have access then you wouldn’t want this page to show up in the search engines so that people could access it for free. But it doesn’t do any harm to include the following tag:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”ALL”>

This gives permission to all the search engines to come along and index every page on your website. It really isn’t needed anymore, as by default the search engines will crawl all of your pages. But if for whatever reason you don’t want them to index a page of your site, you would need to have this piece of code on the pages you wanted to protect.

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>

Only put this on pages that you don’t want the search engines to index and include in their search results. For example, you may want to not show your Privacy Policy page in the search engines.

Keyword Density

Keyword density was the buzz word of the 90s but has since died out somewhat. Many people still subscribe to the notion that you need to have a particular percentage of a keyword that you are trying to rank a webpage for. For example, if Henry was trying to rank one of the pages on his site for the keyword ‘impartial mortgage advice’ then he may want to ensure that he has a keyword density of between 3 – 5% believing this would help his chances to rank better.

However, we don’t really subscribe to this way of thinking. So long as you are writing naturally about the subject and keyphrase you are trying to rank for then we believe the keyword frequency will take care of itself.

Keyword Rich Anchor Text on all Internal Links

If you are writing about a topic on one of your internal pages and you reference something that is mentioned on your Home page then you may want to link back to that page on your site. There is a right and a wrong way to do this with SEO in mind:

Wrong way

<a href=”http://www.mymortgagesite.com”>Home</a>

Right way

<a href=”http://www.mymortgagesite.com”>free mortgage advice</a>

Google will see that you are linking back to your home page with ‘free mortgage advice’ as the anchor text and this will reinforce to them that your page is really about this. And of course, this will improve your chances for this page to appear in the search results.