What does "on the page" really mean?

Although there a many techniques of varying complexity used in search engine optimisation, for most search engines the biggest single factor is still the content of your site. However, most web designers, and even many professional webmasters have only the sketchiest grasp of what search engine spiders (the automated programs that visit your site and collect information about it) are, and more importantly, what they are looking for. "On the page" simply means the code that makes up your site.

All of the text that you can see is "on the page". So are the contents of your Meta tags. So is the address (eg. www.example.com) of your site, and so is the name of the page itself! (eg www.example.com/keyword.asp)

What will you do to my site?

We need to review the existing site together, discuss your objectives for the site, and what it is currently achieving. From that a plan can be agreed to enhance your site, and increase its search engine visibility. Elements of a plan typically include some of the following:

• Increasing the amount of textual content. This is an easy way of increasing both the optimisation of the site, and making it more useful to visitors
  
• Refining the text contents to use your preferred keywords more often. Search engines see any word or phrase that occurs a lot as more important
  
• Making your preferred keywords stand out more. Again, any word or phrase that is emphasised is seen as more important by search engines
  
• Clean up the HTML. Web browser software is often very forgiving of mistakes in HTML code, and will show what the author "meant". Some errors, which are undetectable by looking at the site in a browser can affect how a spider reads a site, and cause it to reach the wrong conclusions as to what your site is about, or prevent it from reading it at all. Some search engines may also give better rankings to smaller pages
  
• Improve site navigation. One of the most common mistakes made by web developers is to create a brilliant website that the search spiders can't see properly. The majority of spiders read HTML as if they were very old browsers, and use of some newer web technologies can effectively block them from seeing your content. They then leave with the wrong impression of your site and its contents

To get the other half of the picture read about our "Off the page" optimisation project. Alternatively, return to the options page