When speaking about on-site SEO I mean optimization of following elements: title, meta tags, image names and alt attributes, code architecture, redirects, URL structure, outbound links, and copy. Let’s look into all this factors in detail.

1. Title. Considered to be one of the most important factors of ranking. Should be no longer than 70 characters, contain keywords as closer as possible to the beginning of the title. Should be generously enriched with keywords, still remaining readable.
2. Meta: description, keyword tags. Google uses description to create a snippet for your website in search results. So, besides being keyword-optimized, description should be optimized for Google users. Google claims that they don’t use keyword meta tag any more in their ranking algorithm, but it is still reasonable to use keywords for other search engines like Yahoo! and Bing.
3. Images. Image tag should always be enriched with alt attribute, containing relevant keywords. Also keyword-enriched image file name is a plus.

The rest on-site ranking factors in the next post.

Cheers,
Alex

• http://www.seomoz.org/blog – SEOmoz – Seattle SEO company, they’ve  got a bunch of SEO tutorials on their website and constantly pushing SEO tips on their blog.
• http://www.mattcutts.com/blog – Matt Cutts – the head of Google’s Webspam team.
• http://www.seobook.com/blog – “Our site offers marketing tips, search analysis, online business tips, and general commentary on the evolution of the web.”

A couple of years ago there was a dispute between me and my friend when we were starting to develop our service of questions and answers – Grabler.ru. The subject of controversy could be formulated as follows: What’s more important in a web project – design or functionality.

Hi believed that if we built a website with great functionality – it wouldn’t matter much what design we had. Users would enjoy our services not paying any attention to the design.

But I always thought, and now I’m convinced of the fact that design is the most important part of the whole project. Design creates the impression right away after a user opens a website. To get an impression of website functionality it may take a whole bunch of time, especially on complicated portals like LinkedIn or Facebook. But to get an impression of design it only takes seconds.

Yesterday a friend of mine had an interview at a web design firm for SEO Analyst position. He was asked a couple of questions one of which was: “What are 3 most important on-site, and 3 off-site factors that influence search engine rankings?”.
I decided to list here my answer to this question. Again, it’s not about PageRank value but about search engine rankings.

On-site factors:

1. Qualitative content enriched with keywords.
2. Title, meta, and h1 tags optimized.
3. Website hosting stability.

Off-site factors:

1. Links from relevant and trusted resources.
2. Relevant anchor text of inbound links.
3. Diversity of linking sites.

This blog is a place were Webtex guys will share their knowledge, thoughts and ideas on web design, development, SEO, marketing, and more. Webtex is a young and small company yet very energetic and ambitious. We will try very hard to make this blog interesting, informative, and really awesome.