On-Page SEO Strategies Revealed

Day and night, whether you're awake or asleep, Google's robots prowl the internet, collecting information on all the billions of web pages and taking it back to store on millions of servers around the world.

These little pieces of code hold your internet status in their metaphorical little hands. They collect the data that discovers your topic, determines your authority, gives each of your pages its own PageRank, and will ultimately decide where you fall in the rankings.

Searching for what you offer on your site, someone types a few words into a search box, and those anonymous robots have decided your fate. Will you be on the first page, with a chance at a click, or on page 2 or beyond, where more than 90 percent of searchers never look?

If only you could talk to the robots, explain what your site is about, they might bring more of those searchers your way.

Well, you can. They understand simple commands, called meta tags, that you hide in an area of your site called the header.

This area of your site comes between the

code at the beginning of your site. It's where the stuff that appears at the top of your web page is stored. If you have a.jpg banner, it's there. The title of your page is there. Your style sheets -- rules for colors and fonts for the whole page -- might be there.

Also included in the header area are basic tags that communicate to the robots. Here are four of the most important and what they mean to your site.

1. Title

The title tag is not a true "meta" tag, since it doesn't have the word "meta" in it. But it speaks to the robots, and it's vitally important in getting your site ranked. The text that you put between the HTML code

You may not need that title tag for your human reader. Maybe you included the site name in that whizbang.jpg header that you had specially created. The robots can't see pictures. They can only read text. If the title tag isn't there, they don't know the name of your site.

2. Description

The description tag is what the search engines display when they suggest your site to a searcher. You want it to be short, direct, accurate, and attractive.

If you're running an HTML-based website, you need to have a different description for each page. If you're running a php site, such as a WordPress blog, each blog post counts as a page, and an SEO plugin such as the free and widely cited All-in-One SEO, will make it easy to set that up to make the most of your SEO strategies.

3. Keywords

The keywords meta tag has been so abused that the robots don't seem to believe it any more. Google doesn't even list it on its webmasters' information page about meta tags.

What happened is that people would put some hot search term (think "Britney Spears") in the keywords tag, even though the term had nothing to do with the site. They were just trying to get rankings for -- get this -- something their site wasn't about. Since the goal is to provide relevant search results, the keyword tag became unusable.

But here's the tag anyway: It may not do any good to use it, although it doesn't do any harm. Knowing your site's master keywords is essential for your own web planning, and having them recorded in the header can be useful for you even if the robots ignore it.

And you never know when the robots will change their minds.

4. Special Notes to Robots

The tag gives the robots specific information about how to process the page.

NOINDEX tells the robots not to include that page in the index. You may want to use this if you have the same text showing on different places on your site for some reason, to keep the robots from accusing you of padding you site with duplicate content.

NOFOLLOW tells the robots not to follow your links. You might want to do that to prevent PageRank leakage, but it's a complicated issue, the subject of a lot of SEO strategies, and a worthy topic for another article.

NOARCHIVE tells the search engines not to give viewers the option of seeing a cached version of your page.

You Can Talk to Robots

Beginners in web management would be wise to have the title, description and keywords tags in place, using keywords that you've chosen to make early inroads on page 1 of the search engines.

If you talk to the robots in words they understand, they can help you get your site in front of the people looking for it.