Why SEO?

Answer is very simple; if you have a site or a blog on Internet that means you have put it there for general public to view it and search engine are the guys who actually let people know about the site/blog all around the web. Life would have been easy had it been just getting your site/blog getting noticed by search engines but the fact is, even though search engines show a huge list of search result but more then 90% of search engine users do not even bother to see results beyond first page of SERPs (seach engine result page). Hence, webmasters around the world are always in the lookout to make sure to bring their page on the first page of SERPs. This is where the SEO come into play.
On-Page Search Engine Optimization

This is a series of steps that should be performed on the pages of your site to optimize it for the search engines. So let’s begin.

Keyword research: This is the first thing that must be done and it should be done patiently. You very well know the content of the page or the site. Hence, create a simple list of important words. Using those words with the help of the keyword constructing tool create a whole bunch of keywords for your site or page or blog (I have explained how to do this here at SEO Concepts and Tools). Identify the important keywords for your different pages and also for your site as a whole. We will use important keywords at important places and less important keywords at less important places.
This is the most important step and I would suggest you to spend considerable amount of time here. This is the base of your SEO efforts. Hence gather as much keywords as possible and categorize them as important, average or less important keywords very carefully. You will really need them throughout the SEO process.

Text content: This is the first and foremost important rule of all; Search engines love good quality text content that is original. Spamming and copied contents are a big no for them. They also give importance to pages that update their contents regularly. Hence, we must follow these steps;

* Write good quality content on your page and make sure they are original. Search engine especially Google has become very smart, it even checks the use of proper spelling and grammar in your content.
* More is the number of texts on page better it is. So, What is the minimum number of words for SEO? Doing some research on the net, I found that there is no such rule about the minimum number of words that should be put on a page for SEO but everywhere they have spoken that minimum number of 150 to 250 words on a page is a good practice. Also make sure that good number of words are used on home page too as it is this page that will be linked most (usually) and hence will be the first target to search engines.
* Keep updating the contents of your pages regularly.
* The contents of your site should be clean html code that is W3 compliant. This ensures that web crawlers can easily crawl through your site. To validate that a page is W3 compliant go to http://www.w3schools.com/site/site_validate.asp

Quality is what we all look for and if you can maintain the same in the content of your site then it will ensure that visitors return to your site, which is a very good sign. Search engines give those sites more value where the percentage of returning visitors are high.