By Alan K'necht
Page structure
Once you've built an SE-friendly Web site, you then need to be sure each page is also SE-friendly. As I said earlier, good HTML structure is the foundation for building an SEO Web page.
The Title Tag
Let’s start at one of the first elements in a Web page—the title tag (<title></title>). This is one of the, if not the, most important elements for SEO on the entire page. All too often, the information contained in this tag is either left blank, has a default value (e.g. “insert title here”), or is simply the company name.
Why is this tag so important? First of all, it is used by every major search engine as a key indicator of the page’s content, and, second, it used by the search engine as the first line in the SERPs.
Give this tag the consideration it deserves.
The Meta Tags
Over the years, various meta tags have come in and gone out of favor with search engines. One of those which has lost its value is the “keywords” meta tag. Most search engines say they don’t look at it anymore but if you have time to create one, go ahead and do so. It doesn’t hurt.
The only meta tag that all search engines presently acknowledge is the "description" meta tag. Once again, this tag should be unique to each page and match the content on the page itself.
The proper format for the description meta tag is, for example:
<meta name="description" content="High-performance running shoes for men and women.">.
JavaScript
We’re all familiar with loading the top of the HTML page with all sorts of JavaScript functions that are necessary for various page features. This includes, but is not limited to: mouse-overs, form validators, cookie checkers, etc. To search engine spiders, this is clutter, and, while they ignore it, they still need to wade through all that code to find the real content of the page. Many spiders have timeouts or maximum character counts associated with them—if they have to wade through too much junk, they’ll abandon their spidering and move on to another site. So avoid making your pages too top heavy by placing too much code between the <head> tags.
The Page Body
This is the part of the Web page that your visitors will be seeing and yes, you can make pages both eye-pleasing and, at the same time, well-optimized for search engines.
Page Headings and Other Word Graphics
For stylistic reasons, many of us have chosen to display page headings as graphics. By turning to our favorite graphical editor, to create unique and creative headings, we’ve removed important words from our Web pages.