Title Tag – Most search industry professionals agree that the title tag is still one of the most important ranking factors.

Description Tag – The description tag is what the visitor will read in the search results when deciding whether or not to click on your listing.

Keyword Tag – The keyword meta tag is NO LONGER a critical factor for ranking. HOWEVER, we still recommend using them for relevance factors.

H1 Header Tag – The H1 tag may be the most important tag to have after the title tag, since it’s the headline for the page.

H2 Header Tag – Your H2 headlines should be specific to a subject that you would like this page to be ranked for, and making them link to other relevant areas of your site helps too.

Image Height & Width Tags – Specifying the height and width attributes for images makes pages load faster, leaving space for the images to fill in as they completely download.

Images Expires Headers – If you use “image expires” in your header, then browsers will cache the images until a specified date, speeding your load times for returning visitors.

Robots Meta Tag – The Robots Meta Tag is a command issued to visiting search spiders. We’ll reveal (2) “secret” tags you should be using for better rankings.

Robots.txt File – The robots.txt file also helps you steer the search engines away from areas you don’t want indexed.

XML Sitemap File – XML sitemaps tell the search engines exactly where every page on your site is located, and the importance you place on each.

URL Canonicalization – The search engines DO see subdomains (including www.) as entirely separate domains, and it’s up to you to ensure that all incoming requests get 301 redirected to the www version to prevent possible duplicate content issues.

Nested Tables – Pages that contain tables inside other tables make the page load slower, since the web browser is forced to find the end of the table before it can display the whole page.

Inline Styles – In-line styles or CSS styles are those which are applied to just one single element.

Inline Javascript – Having too much code in a page makes it load more slowly. Instead of placing code in-line, move it to an external file that you can then call as an include to speed it up.

Favicon – Favicons are the branded logos/icons that appear in the address bar next to your URL.

Favicon Method – To show a favicon, some sites just drop in an .ico file and let Web browsers find it on their own. Instead, there’s code that should can, and should be put in your header.

ALT Tags for Images – With the addition of Google’s Universal search, ALT tags for key images will help your site appear more often in the search results.

Anchor Text – These are the words that you’re using on this page to link to other pages.

Internal Links – These are links that point to other pages within your own domain. The number should be below a certain amount for superior rankings.

External Links – Referencing other websites is great, and can help establish your own authority, but having too many links of any type can mean bad news.

Total Page Size – In November 2009, Google announced that “speed matters” for organic rankings. If you’re over a certain size, you should make it a higher priority to “slim down”.

HTML Size (uncompressed) – This is the size of all code on your web page EXCEPT… (a) External JavaScript (b) Images and (c) Your CSS files.

HTML Compression Status – Compressed pages load faster,and your users (and the search engines) will thank you for compressing them before delivery.

Compression Ratio – Some servers will compress the files before serving them to your visitors, making them load faster……Are your servers doing this?

HTML Size (compressed) – Compressing just your .html files alone likely isn’t critical, BUT it might be something to consider if your pages are way too large.

X-Cache Header – This shows whether or not your site is serving cached pages or not. Caching saves bandwidth and speeds up load times by serving static versions of your dynamic pages.