SEO Resources - Frequently Asked Questions
Ten Tips for Optimizing your Website Pages
There are two main categories for the work of optimizing your website for high Search Engine rankings: 1) off-site optimization and 2) on-site optimization. Off-site optimization includes gaining inbound links, which is of the utmost importance, as well as maintaining your domain for a long period of time without being flagged for spam. On-site optimization essentially means both creating content geared towards certain target Search phrases and optimizing your web pages for Search Engine crawlers.
Here are ten tips for how to tackle your on-site optimization:
- Choose your keywords carefully. Ensuring that you are selecting keywords that aren't too broad and competitive is important. basically, the more general a keyword is the harder it will be to get your site to rank highly for it without gaining a large number of inbound links from well-ranked web pages. On the other hand, you don't want to select keywords that are too specific and don't receive much Search traffic. Striking this balance can be difficult - there are tools to help you evaluate keywords and their level of competition on the Internet. Overture provides one such tool at http://www.inventory.overture.com/d/Searchinventory/suggestion/ remember that most Internet users don't navigate past the first the first page of Google results.
- Ensure that your meta tags contain your keywords at least once. Whichever keywords you are optimizing your individual pages for, make sure you mention that keyword specifically in the meta tags. You don't need to go crazy trying to stuff the keyword in as many times as possible - in fact this is a bed idea.
- Optimize your <title> tags. This is widely considered to be of the utmost importance for on-site SEO. Your title tags should contain the Search phrase you're targeting for each page. They should also contain this phrase or keyword at the earliest character position possible. You don't want to come off like you're trying to spam so it's important to try to achieve a balance between getting your keywords in place and also achieving readability for your users. If users catch on that a page is designed purely for Search Engines it may turn them off. At the very least it can make their experience awkward.
- Include your keyword or Search phrase in the <h1> tags of your pages. If your site is using table-based layout or doesn't include the proper HTML tags you may not even have <h1> tags - if so you should be aware that you are missing out on an important part of building your pages. Search Engines only evaluate your site based on its HTML so utilizing the proper HTML tagging is essential for Search Engine Optimization. Make sure to only use one <h1> tag per page since this is the way it was originally intended - using it more than once may get your page flagged for spamming.
- Use bold and italicized text to emphasize your keywords. When used in moderation this technique can add a bit more weight to your target keywords or Search phrases within the content of your pages. This technique should be kept under control, however, since overuse can result in being flagged for spam by Google.
- You should ensure that your paragraph (<p>) tags include your keywords at least once and as close to the top of your page as possible. This is pretty important for on-site optimization.
- Use your target keywords or Search phrases in the ALT text of your images. This is a good way to capitalize to some extent on the use of images in your pages. Normally, Googlebot or other Search Engine crawlers will ignore your images since they are unable to detect any content contained in an image. The proper utilization of ALT text allows Search Engines a means of associating your images with some relevance to your page topics.
- Include your target keywords or Search phrases in the link text pointing to the pages you wish to optimize. Linking to pages with link text that contains the keywords or Search phrases you are optimizing for can be a big boost for that pages rankings. It's also a good idea to use this technique for any external links that you gain on other sites.
- Containing your keywords or Search phrases in your URLs is another way to improve your on-site optimization. For example, the URL "www.bluewidgets.com/blue-widgets.htm" is likely to experience good rankings for the Search phrase "blue widgets" - all else being equal, of course.
- Avoid "Black Hat" SEO techniques. The best way to do this is ask yourself whether you'd be comfortable explaining your actions to Google. Google and other major Search Engines want to deliver the best results possible to their Search users. For this reason sites that try, through some underhanded means, to achieve high rankings will be penalized as soon as they are discovered.
