SEO Elements for a Web Page

Basic SEO is not very difficult to learn, if it’s done with a properly, provides a methodic and logical approach to your Market. Another facet of SEO to consider before you build your web site is the elements needed to ensure that your site is properly indexed by a search engine. Each search engine places differing importance on different page elements.


The main criteria that every search engine looks for are the site text (meaning keywords), tags — both HTML and meta tags — site links, and the site popularity.

Site Navigation:

Text is one of the most important elements of any web site. JavaScript, Flash, and Images are bad. Of particular importance are the keywords within the text on a page, where those keywords appear, and how often they appear. Best practice is to use Keyword in navigation links. Your keywords make all the difference when a search engine indexes your site and then serves it up in search results. If a drop-down or panel based navigation, make sure it’s crawlable, with no flash or image in it. Rollovers are okay as long as they are crawlable again, avoid use of flash and images for the menu.

Keyword Rich Tags:

In search engine optimization, two kinds of tags are important on your web site: Meta tags and HTML tags. Technically, a Meta tag is a hidden tag that lives in the of an HTML document. It is used to supply additional information about the HTML document. The two most important Meta tags are the keyword tag and the description tag.

The keyword tag occurs at the point where you list the keywords that apply to your web site. A keyword tag on a search engine optimization page might look something like this:

meta name=”keywords” content=”SEO services, search engine optimization, on page seo, off page seo”

The description tag gives a short description of your page. Such a tag for the search engine optimization page might look like this:

meta name=”description” content=”This seo blog provides complete and comprehensive information abFout search engine optimization basics. It’s an ultimate guide to search engine optimization!”


The title tag is especially powerful when the keywords are also contained in the text on the web page, even more so if there is a lot of relevant text with paragraph or section headers organized using keywords in h1, h2, or h3 tags.

High-level headings (H1s) are also important when a crawler examines your web site. Your keywords should appear in your H1 headings, and in the HTML tags you use to create those headings.

Anchor tags are used to create links to other pages. An anchor tag can point users to another web page, a file on the Web, or even an image or sound file. You’re probably most familiar with the anchor tags used to create links to other web sites.

Links (External and Internal):

Links show an interactivity with the community (other sites on the Web), which points to the legitimacy of your web site. Links aren’t the only, or even the highest, ranking criteria, but they are important all the same. Quantity and quality of links are the keys here. Broken links can lower your search engine ranking. To be of value, the links on your web pages must be related to the content of the page, and they are considered as biggest single factor to effective SEO is good quality links. These are the external links.

Create footer with “quick links” that contain keyword. Create a separate webpage for each keyword.

There is another group of links that can also help your SEO rankings. Internal linking is simply the process of linking to other pages within your site. Wherever you can be sure to link to internal pages using anchor text and hopefully that anchor text contains your keyword for the page that the link is going to.

URL Structure:

Always build a website having static (not dynamic) URL structure to include the keywords in the directory, path names or in file names. To separate keywords, always use hyphens on priority basis otherwise underscores, and forward slashes are good separators. Dynamic URL’s are not considered as seo friendly.

Page Content:

Content is the major and the most crucial element in search engine optimization. Make sure keywords in the content, are used appropriately as well in text links. Ideally use at least 250-500 words of text between the body tags. Use keyword throughout copy. Write unique content as It is in content quality that a site’s true potential shows through, and although search engines cannot measure the likelihood that users will enjoy a site. Don’t just reuse a manufacturer’s product description (e.g.: duplicate content issues).

Is There Any Need to Perform SEO for A Website?

Of course Yes. SEO is about manipulating search engines — to an extent. There are several appropriate and ethical factors which can build your site’s search engine visibility, and it’s not as simple as getting a ton of unrelated links from unrelated sites. Your web site is much like that one person in the huge crowd. In the larger picture your site is nearly invisible, even to the search engines that send crawlers out to catalog the Web. To get your site noticed, even by the crawlers, certain elements must stand out. And that’s why you need search engine optimization.

It takes time to turn a dead site around or build up a new one from scratch. Sure, you can quickly become visible in Google, MSN or Yahoo, but if your visitor traffic is largely from Google, you’re going to have to focus on creating good content, getting relevant links from other sites and directories, and being patient. This approach gives the website credibility and stability in the long term, too.

So what exactly can and can’t you do? To achieve a high or better position in search results, a website must be more than simply recognizable by a search engine spider or a crawler. It must satisfy set of criteria that not only gets the site indexed, but can also get it indexed above most (if not all) of the other sites that fall into that category or topic. Some of the criteria by which a search engine crawler determines the rank a site should have in a set of results include:

• Site Content
• Proper Anchor text
• Site popularity
• Link context
• Thematic links
• Title tags
• Keywords
• Site language
• Domain or Site maturity

As an estimation, there are several hundred more criteria that could also be considered before a site is ranked by a search engine. Some of the criteria listed also have multiple points of view. For example, when looking at link context, a crawler might take into consideration where the link is located on the page, what text surrounds it, and where it leads to or from.

These criteria are also different in importance as for some search engines, quality or quantity of external links or both, are more important than site maturity, and for others, links have little importance. These weights and measures are constantly changing, so even trying to guess what is most important at any given time is a pointless exercise. Just as you figure it out, the criteria will shift or change completely. By nature, many of the elements are likely to have some impact on your site ranking, even when you do nothing to improve them. However, without your attention, you’re leaving the search ranking of your site to chance. That’s like opening a business without putting out a sign. You’re sure to get some traffic, but because people don’t know you’re there, it won’t be anything more than the curiosity of passersby.

Retrieval Of Web Information And Keyword Ranking

The web search engine provides fresh data to Web and the retrieval of this data is a combination activity of the spider (or crawler or robot), the search engine database, and the search algorithm. All these three elements makes the retrieval of the word or phrase that is used by a surfer or a user in search engine’s user interface.

Ranking plays a major part in search engine optimization. There are several factors that affects ranking. Keep in mind, however, that different search engines use different ranking criteria, so the importance each of these elements plays will vary. Crawler-based search engines go about determining relevancy, when confronted with hundreds of millions of web pages to sort through. They follow the search engine’s algorithm. However, all major search engines follow the general rules below.

Lets discuss the factors that affect search engine ranking.

Content: Content plays a vital role in keyword ranking and is also termed ass the king of World Wide Web. In order to attain higher search engine rankings, the content on your website should be descriptive, informative, fresh and original.

Location: One of the the main rules in a search engine ranking algorithm involves the location. Location doesn’t refer here to the location (as in the URL) of a web page. Instead,it refers to the location of key words and phrases on a web page. So, for example, if a user searches for “flowers,” some search engines will rank the results according to where on the page the word “flowers” appears. Obviously, the higher the word appears on the page, the higher the rank might be. So a web site that contains the word “flowers” in the title tag will likely appear higher than a web site that is about flowers but does not contain the word in the title tag. What this means is that a web site that’s not designed with SEO in mind will likely not rank where you would expect it to rank. The site www.flowers.com is a good example of this. In a Google search, it appears ranked fifth rather than first, potentially because it does not contain the key word in the title tag.

Frequency: Frequency is the other major factor in search engine optimization and how content relevancy is determined. The frequency with which the search term appears on the page may also affect how a page is ranked in search results. So, for example, on a page about flowers, one that uses the word five times might be ranked higher than one that uses the word only two or three times. When word frequency became a factor, some web site designers began using hidden words hundreds of times on pages, trying to artificially boost their page rankings. Most search engines now recognize this as keyword spamming and ignore or even refuse to list pages that use this technique.

Links: One of the more recent ranking factors is the type and number of links on a web page. Make sure to have a number of quality links to your website as links that come into the site, links that lead out of the site, and links within the site are all taken into consideration. Valued links always help a website to rank higher. Again number of links doesn’t matter; links should be genuine and come from a quality website. More accurately, the number of relevant links coming into your page, versus the number of relevant links within the page, versus the number of relevant links leading off the page will have a bearing on the rank that your page gets in the search results.

Click-throughs: One last element that might determine how your site ranks against others in a search is the number of click-throughs your site has versus click-throughs for other pages that are shown in page rankings. Because the search engine cannot monitor site traffic for every site on the Web, some monitor the number of clicks each search result receives. The rankings may then be repositioned in a future search, based on this interaction with the users.