Page Title, Keywords, and Title Tags... Oh My!

It is important to optimize your website. I know you hear this all the time. Optimize, Optimize Optimize. But the real question is what does optimization this entail? Well. . . The fact of the matter is that it entails many pieces that work in conjunction with each other...

• Title Tag — Title tag text shows up in several places including as the bold blue text on Google Search Engine Results pages.
• Meta Description Tag — This tag is importance is it appears on the Search Engine Results page right underneath the page title. Sometimes a snippet of your text will appear instead but you always want to have a meta description on every page and it's usually a good idea to customize it for each page.
• Page Title — This is the actual page title your visitors will see when they visit the different pages of your site. Include your keywords in them, and try to put them inside an H1 tag. This will give them greater SEO power.
• Your Site's Text — include your keywords repeatedly in the text of your site, but the text still needs to be readable. A good rule of thumb is no more than 3-6% density. Any higher than that and you risk labeling as search engine spam.
• Alt Tags — each image on your site has the ability to define "alternate" text. This is originally intended for Web site "reading" machines that read out Web pages to those who might have difficulty seeing the page. Instead of leaving the alt tags blank, fill them with descriptive text of the image that includes your keywords.
• Filenames — Your page filenames will actually show up in the URL for that page for example last week's post has the file name . Using your keywords in these filenames can really help your rankings.
• Your Domain Name — if you can get a domain name that uses a primary keyword this will give a big boost to your rankings. The implication is that this the entire content of your site is centered around this keyword.