Important elements of the page

These are things that you’ll read all over the place, but I’m going to post them here so that this blog can be a “howto” for SEO.

When designing web pages, it’s very important to put certain things in certain parts of the page. Search engines care very much about the title of the page and the h1 tag on the page. Why? Because the title shows up on everyones browser exactly the same. It’s in the title bar of the browser and you can’t really mess with it to make it look different. If it has certain words in it, then that must be what your page is actually about.
The h1 tag because it’s big. Generally, in designing pages, you should put your most important content towards the top left of the page. This is where readers start reading, this is where google and other search engines consider to be the most important part of the page. Basically, they rank stuff on your page in order of importance based on how likely the reader is to see it / click on it. That’s why the h1 tag is so important. If you put it at the top left of the page, google knows it’s the absolute first thing a reader is going to see on the page. Make sure you have your keywords in it.
In all these things, don’t be obsessive. Produce good content and don’t try to trick google. Don’t put all kinds of h1 tags on your page that are made to look small on the page with css. It won’t work.