The second activity to perform is 'on-site optimisation'. This is usually what is understood by most people to be the bulk of work of what is popularly understood under 'SEO'.

When we get requests for website design, our potential client  would often ask if SEO is included in the cost of the website and if we say no, they are normally taken aback since it is a service that is often offered as part of a website design package by other web designers.

On closer inspection, this normally consists of updating the website's 'meta tags'. Unfortunately often the client is left with the impression that this would be enough to catapult his/her website to the top of the search engines.

The truth is that the 'on-site' factors are often the smallest component of the whole SEO/Internet Marketing effort. Why is that?

One needs to take a look at the history of search engines to understand why this is the case. In previous years (BG – Before Google), search engines analyzed the actual web page for clues as to what the page is about, so that it could decide whether the page should appear high up in the Search Engine Results Pages (also commonly known as 'SERPS'). The various elements that were used in this analysis would be mostly the 'meta tags' and the words on the page (keyword density).

The 'meta tags' are hidden text elements that is not visible on the actual web page, but which are visible to the search engines. These tags mainly consist of the page title (not strictly a meta tag, but very important nonetheless), the meta 'description' tag and that overused, over-abused tag, the 'keywords' meta tag.

These tags are supposed to contain the main keywords and then voila!, your site will magically rise to the top of the search engines. Unfortunately these days (AG – After Google), this is no longer the case. The reason is that

1. it was very easy for people to manipulate these tags and stuff them with keywords, thereby manipulating the search engine results and thereby rendering the search results increasingly meaningless and
2. Google changed the face of search engines by using a different algorithm. Google largely ignores the meta tags!

The most important tag on the page is the Title tag. Apart from that, Google only assigns a very small importance to aspects such as keyword density, h1, h2, h3 etc tags and the actual meta tags.

We do optimise the website – making sure that each page has unique title tags, making sure that the description and keyword meta tags are unique and well structured, making sure that on the relevant pages the keyword density is high enough but not too high to trigger alarms (if it is too high, the site may be considered 'spammy' and penalised).

However, we do not agonise too much over this step, and what is important to note is that this step just cannot be done without having done the keyword research first, else a lot of effort might be put in to something that is ultimately a waste of time. This is largely the reason why this activity is not automatically included in our web design services.