It’s amazing how on-page optimization techniques get no love from SEO experts and marketing gurus. Of course, it all comes down to who you call and expert and guru really. It’s true that on-page tactics have been abused and abused more by search engine gamers in the past but there are still a few techniques that you should implement on your site regardless of what “SEO gods” tell you:

1. Title Tags Matter: title tags matter big time. Put your most important keyword first and go from there. Put you brand last if you can. Don’t try to make the title more than it should be. As long as your title is not a collection of random words, then you are fine but don’t forget your keywords.

2. Header Tags Matter: It absolutely does. I have tested a few sites and have seen significant results by using <h1> and <h2> tags on my site. I was actually moved from position 5 on page 2 for a highly competitive keyword to position 9 page 1. It may sound like a very small improvement but can’t beat being on page 1.

3. Bold, Italic Tags Matter: They do. You can give search engines cues about what is important on your page and what’s not. Use <strong> and <i> tags when you can (actually using <strong> is more effective than <b> for some reason).

4. Keyword and Description Tags matter: The so called “big picture” marketing gurus might disagree with me, but keywords and description tags absolutely do matter. I have personally seen results by implementing them (not just moving up the rankings but also higher conversion rates). Don’t ignore them.

5. Sitemaps Matter: creating a sitemap is not really that hard so it baffles me when SEO professionals claim that it shouldn’t be done as it’s not worth it. Why not?! Folks, it literally takes a minute to create a sitemap and you will have something that search engines love. Why not do it? Yes. You can use the time to focus on FaceBook, but if you spend 1 minute a day on your FaceBook strategy, then you are in deep trouble.

Remember that search engine optimization is not an exact science. Nobody really knows what works. We know what doesn’t work thanks to Google (Black Hat techniques definitely won’t work for long). But other than that, there is no book or article from Google that claims you shouldn’t do META tags. It’s tough and boring but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.