Search engines also consider other factors on your webpage to determine your SERPs.

Title tags

Quite simply, each page should have a descriptive title. It still amazes me to find websites with titles such as “Template” or, even worse, nothing at all! It’s recommended to have your main description and keywords in your title. Be careful not to stuff it with keywords however, it may be considered spam. Make it look natural and actually describe your site and page. And it’s a good SEO technique to have a different title for each page, that actually describes the content and purpose of that particular page - not just a “XYZ website.com” title throughout your site!

Keyword density

This is basically the number of times a keyword is used on a web page divided by the total number of words on the page. Different search engines like different keyword density. MSN for example, according to my experience, prefers pages with higher keyword density. But if your keyword density is too high you can get penalized for keyword stuffing. I personally try and keep it to around 3%. That’s 3 keywords you are targeting to every 100 words on your page. Try and experiment. Make sure you give search engines enough time to react to your changes.

H1 and H2 tags

H1 and H2 HTML heading tags will make your font bigger and indicate to visitors and search engines that those phrases are (more) important. Examples:

• This is H1 text

• This is H2 text

It’s recommended that you use H1 tags for your headings and H2 for your sub-headings. Headings, if used correctly, enhance the readability and usability of your webpages, both for real readers and search engine spiders. They add more “weight” to pages by emphasizing the subject matter. But try not to overuse these. A few will do, with the main purpose of making your page easier to read, use and index.

And steer away from “secret” CSS and other techniques that try and “mask” header text as normal text - that is, where you markup normal paragraph text with “H1″ to try and give it more weight, and then in your stylesheet or otherwise make the H1 text look smaller like “normal” text. Although you of course have flexibility in your site design (font sizes, etc.), the aforementioned technique is frowned upon.

Bold / strong

You can argue that using bold font for your keywords and phrases will not have an effect on your SERPs, however it won’t hurt you, and some SEO scholars think it helps. In any case, try using bold for important text on your page that do not warrant header tags.

Meta tags

This is “invisible” information on a webpage that is not intended for users to see, but instead provides information (such as “description” and “keywords”) to search engine crawlers, browser software and some other applications about your page. Current examples from our home page (this changes from time-to-time):
<meta name="description" content="Learn the Search Engine Optimization alphabet" />
<meta name="keywords" content="ask, blogroll, contributors, google, live search, search engines, seo, seo glossary, yahoo" />

The importance of meta tags for some search engines, such as Google, have declined, but some search engines still use them. So it doesn’t hurt to use them and every bit helps!

Content

Good content has become more important in the eyes of search engines in recent years. And why not? Your website should (in theory, anyway) provide a good, meaningful and useful experience to visitors. So content remains king in the SEO world - the more relevant, original and fresh content you can provide, the better!

Next: 5) Sitemaps