When you want to see your website pop up very high on the page of results presented by a search engine, there is no end to the different tactics you can employ. Of course, the heart and soul of search engine optimization (SEO) lies in the content of your pages and the sites that link to them; there are definitely things you can do to their raw HTML to make them rank a little better.

For starters, you probably already have a decent grasp of the way pages on your website get ranked by the search engines. A user puts in search terms, and the engine compares those terms to the contents of the page. It ranks pages based on the frequency of the terms’ appearance (weighted by several factors) and by the way the page relates to others on other website. By incorporating keywords into your pages’ HTML code appropriately, you can significantly improve the way they get ranked.

When it comes to thinking of keywords on a page-per-page basis, density is of paramount importance. You want your pages to use keywords as much as possible without harming the reader’s impression and without appearing dangerously “spammy” to search engines. Using your keywords in your code can help you fine-tune your position between these two alternatives. Since end users never see your raw HTML, it can be a fine place to rack up additional keyword mentions, without going overboard, of course!

Your keywords can appear in tags and headers in your HTML. The venerable “meta” tag deserves a little special attention here. There was a time when this tag was the ruling king of the SEO game. Webmasters would pack it full of search terms. The search engines caught on quickly, and soon began heavily discounting the meta tag, or even ignoring it entirely. Today, though, you need to give it a little attention. You may have noticed that some websites on some search engine results pages display a small summary beneath their listing. This summary is generated automatically from the meta tag! Make sure that your meta tags contain an honest and engaging page summary.

When your page gets indexed, everything happens automatically, and very, very quickly. Although studying SEO can make it seem like the indexing algorithms and programs are super-smart, you should not get too impressed. It is surprisingly easy to flummox them, and one way that you can (inadvertently) do so is by using bogus HTML. The indexers will not waste any time trying to decipher confusing code; they simply skip it. This can waste large portions of your SEO efforts. In order to make sure that every character in your HTML gets read and taken into account, you need to verify every page before posting it. There are plenty of free utilities that can do this quickly and easily.

Hopefully, this article has inspired you to take a look beneath the hood and see how you can give your website a little SEO boost by tweaking its coding. Search engine optimization can be a competitive field; you should investigate every possible advantage that can help you rank above your competitors.