Someone explain SEO and Tags to an idiot :)

On-page optimization

Writing copy that has about a 1-3% keyword density of the keyword you want to rank for, plus some LSI keywords that come up from the related searches listings in Google.

Meta tags

Listing between 5 - 10 keywords that relate to what is in your site, and also the description that users will see when they find you in a search engine. I believe they are important for search engine rankings.

For example, this page has the following meta information.
Wordpress has plugins that take care of that.

Header Tags, h1, h2, h3

These are html markups that delineate logical headings for your site. Depending on the style, they can have different fonts, sizes and colors. It is a very good idea to have your keywords appear in the h1 and h2 tags. These tags show emphasis and importance to Google. Also, I believe in using strong and b html tags for your keyword as well.

Excellent explanations! Thanks for helping out the SEO Noob

@ Eager2SEO, Thank you lot, explain all

I'd better add that offpage optimization is ultimately what is going to rank you for your desired keywords.

Offpage SEO is about creating anchor-text backlinks to your pages from other sites around the internet. There are many methods to doing this.

-Blog Commenting
-Article Marketing
-Profile Linking
-Forum Signature Links
-Web 2.0 Bookmarking

etc.

Say, if your site was Google.com, and you want to rank for the term "Google", you will want to create many high quality links around the internet using "Google" as the anchor text... like this:

Google

Each backlink, counts as a "vote" to your website. The onpage stuff mentioned above will certainly help the search engines decide what keywords you should rank for, but backlinking is where the bulk of your SEO should be spend.

Cheers,
Dave

Title tags are the most important of all.

Check out this one:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/doc...rter-guide.pdf

Just to clarify a bit further, the term "On-Page Optimization" is an umbrella term for optimizing the content on your page for the search engines and in fact all the tags you mention fall under this umbrella term.

I cant add much to the descriptions of these terms already.

- On page optimization is a technique by means of which your web page gets a high ranking on various search engines. It also refers to factors that have an effect on your web site or web page listing in natural search results. These factors are controlled by you or by coding on your page.
- Meta Tag is a part of a web page coding that gives the basic description avout the website.
- Header tag is a structured page or section heading on a web page.

Hi!
explanation of mentioned terms by you are

1 on page optimization.

On page optimization are changes that you do on your site that improves your Ranking
following are a few points

Title : Must be relevant and it must contain no more than 2 or 3 keywords then meta tag, then body and footer. All must contain relevant content to title, meta, and keywords.

EX:<title> William's Sports shop-buy any authentic spots gears and top brands sports equipment available</title >

(here we targeted both top brands and authentic equiment two key words)

2.Meta tag: Gives meta description to google and other search engines about summary of what page is about.

<meta name='description'=content="William's sports shop has large collection of authentic sports gear like studs, sports shoes, rackets, and etc.You are provided with all the top branded sports equipment to choose from and at discounted rate">

3.Header tag consist heading for the contents it can be easily learned easily remeber that it must be relevant to content. It must have a relevant keyword and keep in mind Proximity, prominance and occurance.

Everyone made a lot of great points. You should know that off page optimization accounts for 70% of the work to rank your site. There's a lot of different ways to get backlinks, but from my experience, the absolute best kind of backlink you can get is a contextual backlink. Get a lot of them, and Google will love you. Good luck Charlotte

P.S. A contextual backlink is simply a link that is within the body of content.