On-Page SEO Priorities: Title's, Anchor Text or Meta data?

[Boodreaux]

**Any suggestions for prioritized on-page SEO work? Relative weights of importance? **

**What is most important from highest to lowest? **

• MetaTag Descriptions?
• Titles?
• Anchor Text?
• Alt Text - for images?
• Anything else?

We might not be able to do everything at once like I desire ......but I do feel we should at least get the ball moving in the right direction.

I am looking for ideas or suggestions on what to prioritize for a little bit of on-page SEO work on our website.  I personally feel that SEO is pretty important but I am a novice.  I have been reading this site the past week and want to convince my webpage guy that on-page SEO is important and that we should at least do a few things and gradually get the work done.

Rightfully so our #1 priority is to redesign our landing pages (they are bad) . I also think we should do a little On-Page work concurently. (Lack of on-page SEO is also preventiing me from successfully submitting and being accepted by Dmoz, Yahoo, BOW etc)

He is mainly a back engine guy and does a very good job with that. If I were to TELL him to do a few prioritized on-page SEO things what would you suggest?   He did do something on the home page at my suggestion but that is all to this point.  We have over 400 pages indexed with very little on-page SEO on them.

Thank you,

UtahTiger

[UnderRugSwept]

Your title tag is the most important out of all the things you listed. Make sure it includes you top keyword you're trying to rank for, but don't stuff any more than two keywords or phrases in there. And don't exceed 70 characters. If you find you have a lot of extra room, include your brand name.

If you're linking to internal pages from your homepage, use anchor text you want those pages to rank for--as long as it makes sense to your customers.

Meta description doesn't have much, if any, SEO value. It is what potential customers will see in the search engine results; a good description will increase your click through rate. It's been theorized that Google tracks click through rate and bounce rate and uses this information to determine relevancy of sites to tweak ranking, thus you could say the meta description indirectly affects your ranking--for better or for worse.

As far as your boss not recognizing the value of SEO, just tell him: what good will it do to build the best site the world as ever seen if no one ever sees it?

[Boodreaux]

Thank you for the input.    lol  Neither one of us know SEO but he does now how to do the back-end database stuff.  

[UnderRugSwept]

Well, a couple more simple things you can implement are:

Make sure your target keywords appear on the page a few times, but don't overdo it! I cannot stress that enough. Only use them as much as what would sound natural to a human reading it.

Give your page at least a couple of paragraphs of quality, helpful content. My personal minimum I strive for is 300-400 words--that is just what has worked for me.

Make sure all images have relevant alt tags (your web person will know what that means; If not, you have a bigger issue than being new to SEO)

Don't put too many links on the page. i.e. If you have 200 products, don't link to every single one of them from the homepage; break them into categories and sub -pages.

Use a free service like http://pingdom.com/ to check the load time of your homepage. It will offer suggestions for improvement.

Set up 301 redirects to avoid duplicate content penalties. http://www.ragepank.com/articles/3/preventing-duplicate-content/
(OK, that one's not as easy)

Submit a sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools

I hope you succeed in your endeavors!

[UnderRugSwept]

I just thought of something else. This is slightly less critical but try to keep the file size of your page under 1mb. Some say 50kb but I think that's a little extreme in the age of broadband. The site I market is 1.1mb and loads in only 1.18 seconds. But do try to stay under 1mb because of mobile phones which are slower. (Unless you have a mobile version of your site, like I do)

Also, make sure all of your code validates. http://validator.w3.org/