Important web page elements

A web page is made up of different web page elements. These elements are placed in the HTML code of your web pages. Depending on how you use these elements, your web pages can have good or bad rankings.

A web page is a single page on your web site. A web site is the combination of all web pages that can be found under a domain name. Here are some web page elements that can influence the ranking of your web site on search engines:

Title

The title of a web page is the text within the tags in the HTML code of a web page.
Example :

The Meta keywords tag

The Meta Keywords tag allows you to define which search terms are important to your web page according to your opinion. It should be placed between the ...tags in the HTML code of your web page. Many search engines don't use this tag anymore.
Example: ""

The Meta description tag

The Meta description tag allows you to describe your web page. Some search engines display the text of the Meta description tag in the search results. That means that this tag allows you to influence the appearance of your search results in some search engines.
Example: ""

Body text

The body text is the text on your web page that can be seen by people in their web browsers. It does not include HTML commands, comments, etc. The more visible text there is on a web page, the more a search engine can index. The body text of a web page is very important to search engines.

The first sentence of the body text

The first sentence of the body text is the first sentence after the tag in the HTML code of your web page. Some search engines give more relevance to search terms when they appear in the first sentence. Some will use your first sentence as the description of your page on the search result page.

Note that the first sentence of the body text is often not the first sentence that is visible on your web page. Depending on your web page design, the first sentence might appear somewhere else on your page.

Search engines consider the first sentence that can be found after the body text as the first sentence, regardless of where it appears on your page.
Example: "Here goes the first sentence. This text is not the first sentence."

Headlines
...H1 headline texts are the texts that are written between the "

...

" tags in the HTML code of a web page. Some search engines give extra relevance to search terms that appear in the headline texts.
Example: "

your very big headline text

"
Web pages have many more elements. Each element can influence the search engine ranking of the web page. In addition to the elements that can be found on a web page (on-page factors), the ranking of a web page is also influenced by factors outside the web site (off-page factors or off-site factors).
Details can be found in the next..

An introduction to search engine marketing

Why do you have to optimize your web pages for search engines?

New web sites can be submitted to search engines by filling out an online form. Unfortunately, a submission of your web site to search engines is not enough. Without optimizing your web pages, your web site will be listed in position 7,523 of 634,234,202 result pages.

Only a few web surfers look further than the first or second result page of a search engine 75% of searchers never look further than page one (Source: Georgia Institute of Technology). Most search engines display ten results on the first page; and very few searchers click the links to look at the second page.

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen points out: "Users almost never look beyond the second page of search results." Danny Sullivan, ClickZ Search Engine Marketing Columnist, puts it out this way: "Being listed 11 or beyond means that many people may miss your web site."

You'll only get targeted visitors from search engines if your web site is listed in the top results. You must tell search engines what your web site is all about

Search engines must be able to find out what your web site is all about. If search engines cannot find out that your web site is about fishing equipment, they cannot give your web site high rankings for that keyword.

The process of optimizing your web pages so that search engines can quickly find out what your web site is all about is called search engine optimization (SEO).