When you try to optimize your web site, the primary thing which should creep in to your mind is that you have created the site mainly for human visitors and not search robots. Search engine bots are at ease with HTML; that is why HTML is given more weightage. You need not be an expert in HTML to optimize your site for search engines. In the source code of the web site, you will find a cluster of HTML tags, some of which are known to you and some not.

HTML tags which hold primary importance are the title and heading tags. The title of your web page speaks a lot more than you think. It will be displayed in the search results as a succinct description of your web page. Possibly you may not want it to be a weird one crammed with key words. To enable click through, it has to be readable and interesting to the surfer. For the same reason, use separate title for each page clearly stating the content in a concise manner. One or two important key words from the content of the page with a moderate number of characters will attract the attention of search engines as well. 

Optimizing the header tags carry so much importance as title tags. One or two headers (h1, h2) in a page containing the key words are sure to work favorable towards on page optimization. Strictly avoid any links with in the header tags which may nullify the effect. Creating contextual hyperlinks to other pages of the web sites does a great job in SEO. It is equally important that the links and adjoining text should contain the principal key words.

The use of Meta tags has long been a topic of debate in the SEO domain. What I have concluded is that most of the search engines are not giving any importance for the Meta tags in ranking a web site. But again, we are not sure of the algorithms on which search engines are working. So, as a rule, site owners still preserve these Meta tags in their web site. The key word attribute of the Meta tag should contain all the key words which are being used in the web site. The Meta description has to be given more preference because in some search engines, this may be shown along with the results. So keep the beginning attractive and optimized with the important key words close together. Search engines give more importance to closely packed key words.

The paragraph tag or the body of the page has to maintain quality content which needs to be updated regularly. Key words must be inserted in the beginning of the page and maintain optimum key word density (3-7%). Bold, underlined and italicized key words carry more weightage. Key words in a bulleted list are also given more importance by the search engines.

Another point worth mentioning is the image tag where you can make use of the name of image and the “alt” attribute for stuffing key words. It is recommended to use fewer images, but when used, define the height, width and the alt attributes of the images.