On-Page Optimization
Let's try to imagine that we are a search engine bot. Also, let's think of your web page as consisting of a number of elements that the bot will recognize. These will include, but will not be <title> and </title> limited to, the title (as denoted by anything between the tags ), the headers, if any are present (as denoted by anything between the <h1></h1> tags, and to an increasingly less important extent the <h2> and </h2> tags, the <h3> and </h3> tags, and so on "¦), the words within the URL of the page itself and the body text. In the body text the search engine will pay particular attention to the density of the keywords, that is, the number of times a given keyword appears throughout the page.
Thus, if the keyword phrase "public sector market research" appears in all the above elements, and appears scattered about three or four times throughout the page's body text, then the search engine will understand that this web page is about public sector market research.
There are other elements where this keyword phrase may appear, and this may further reinforce the web page's case to be rated as an important page on the subject. These elements are the meta description tag, the meta keywords tag (though this is vastly less important than it used to be), so-called ALT tags (which are words placed as an alternative, or in addition to, images on the page, and which appear when you hold the mouse pointer over a picture "" remember the search engine bot cannot see images, but if there is an ALT tag it will provide a further clue) and comments tags (where words appear in the HTML of the page but not in the visible text).
In the early days of search engine optimization unscrupulous practitioners would use "keyword stuffing" or multiple usage of the keyword into the meta elements, which used to increase the page's rankings in the search engines, which is why these elements now carry much less weight than they once did. There were also other tricks, like having dozens or even hundreds of the same keyword phrase in white lettering on a white background, so real people couldn't see the ghastly stuffing that was going on, but in the "eyes" of those early search engines that text was there in the HTML and could be read. These days such practices can get a page banned from a search engine's listing altogether.
There are other ways to denote the importance of a keyword phrase to make it stand out from the rest of the text, and so indicate the importance and relevance of that phrase within the page. These are having the phrase in bold, in italic, in upper case and as part of a hyperlink (but that blurs into the off-page aspect).
Some web page types which are elementally reduced, such as blog posts, will rely more on these latter, and on keyword density within the body text itself, to announce its importance.
Keyword density is important in the sense that there should not be overuse of the keyword phrase. As the search engines' algorithms become more complex, the search engines (it can be assumed) will resemble humans more and more, as far as the on-page aspect is concerned. So white text on white background will eventually be discounted altogether (or used as a flag for spam), and such things as sneaky redirects (when one page is optimized but then immediately takes the user to another page) will be equally frowned upon by the engines.
So on-page optimization is largely an exercise of ticking the boxes. Is your keyword phrase in the URL of the page, in the title tag, in the header tags and scattered naturally throughout the body text? Follow the simple rules above, and don't be led into anything underhand or devious, and you will have satisfied the conditions for good on-page optimization. The on-page aspect can be done on a DIY basis and this used to be all that was necessary to get your pages ranked highly in the search engines.
Now that has changed, and off-page needs have to be given much more consideration. So I'll be spending much more time on this latter aspect, which cannot be done so easily in-house, or by the web site owner on a DIY basis.
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