Basic SEO Article - Focusing on Quick Optimization techniques for the newbie
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Basic On-Page SEO
On-page optimization is often ignored by the top sites
on Google - after all, who cares about a few percentage
points when you can literally buy your way to the top
of the search engine result pages (SERPs) with a bucket-load
of inbound links?
Today I'll discuss a bit about why, contrary to common
practice, why on-page SEO is so important and then tell
you how you can quickly optimize your web pages even if
you have very little time!
On-Page SEO - The Benefits
A lot of webmasters (including some self-proclaimed SEO
experts) claim that on-page optimization is obsolete -
that the only thing that matters is off-page optimization
(i.e. link building).
So is that true?
Actually, like most SEO hype, there's some truth involved.
Inbound links have become the overwhelming determining
factor in a website's search engine rankings, but there's
more to the story then that.
Why bother with On-Page SEO?
Here are just three reasons off the top of my head:
With everyone chasing after links, the playing field is
leveled somewhat. This means that well-optimized pages
will have a better chance of ranking higher if they might
not beat the top websites on link count (but come close
nevertheless).
Because of keyword spamming, search engines paid more
attention to links. Now, because of link-spamming, search
engines are moving back towards paying more attention
to other ranking factors, including on-page optimization.
Over 90% of your competition probably doesn't know how
to optimize their web pages, or are doing it wrong, or
are probably committing some sort of search engine spamming,
so that you can immediately place yourself within the
top 10% of your niche by just spending a few minutes on
each page and getting things done right (or hiring someone
to do it for you if you have a huge site).
I'll be honest. No one knows exactly how important on-page
optimization is. Of course, you should still be paying
a great deal of attention to link-building, but the key
is this link-building is a long-term process,
whereas on-page optimization a short, one-time thing.
With its obvious ranking benefits, why wouldn't you be
optimizing your web pages?
On-Page SEO A Quick Tour
Before I go over the techniques, I want you to remember
these things:
Search engine optimization is a lot about doing things
in moderation you can't do too little of it
otherwise your pages won't rank at all, and if you go
too far (and start spamming the search engines), you'll
get your website banned and essentially kiss your online
business goodbye.
Secondly, before you are optimizing a particular page,
make sure you write down a short list of core keywords
for that page. This is extremely important, search engines
rank pages, not websites, so all your efforts should be
directed towards making sure individual pages rank best
for their own primary keyword.
Title Tag
The Title tag is where most webmasters make serious mistakes
(in case you didn't know, the Title tag contains the text
that you see on the top of your browser window). Now the
best way to write a Title tag is to make sure that you
get your best keywords for that page in there. Don't bother
with words that are not needed, such as and
or the stick with your core keywords.
Using the example of a website owned by a professional
resume writer looking to start their online business,
for the home page you would probably use the following
Title tag:
Professional Resume Writer | Guaranteed Resume Writing
Not only do you have your core keywords in there, you
have also managed to combine them in one line without
using the needless words like and and
the .
Of course, you can always go too far and stuff the Title
tag with as many keywords as possible. If you are thinking
about doing that, DON'T! That sort of optimization will
land you into trouble with the search engine algorithms,
which automatically flag any website that uses spammy
optimization techniques and once you are
red-flagged like this, you'll be going down, not
up in the rankings.
The next step is to take care of all your header tags.
Header Tags
Also known as H1 and H2 (and so on) tags, the header tags
in your page give the search engine spiders an idea of
how your page is structured. Therefore, if you can put
in important keywords that are relevant to your page's
content in the header tags, the search engine will then
know that this particular page contains information
on topics relating to those keywords thus
helping your page rank better for those keywords.
It's actually simpler than it sounds. Sticking with the
Resume Writer website, let's suppose you have a
page that s titled How to write a Resume (bear
with me here). Now, you might have two sections on that
page an article on resume writing and general
resume writing tips. Now instead of lumping it all together,
here's what you could do:
H1 tag for the page heading including
a variation of the Title tag
H2 tags for both sections Resume
Writing and Resume Writing Tips in this
case.
Textual Tags
When a search engine spider is scanning a page, it's looking
for several factors to determine what is important and
what's not. In particular, it looks for text tags
bold, underline or italics, to help it rank the page.
Why?
Quite simply, the search engine spider is programmed to
think that any text that is put in bold, italics
or underlined is considered important information by the
user, and therefore it might be important.
This is where bullet points come in handy as well.
I said might be important because search engine spiders
have very sophisticated algorithms that look at hundreds
of other factors, including the relevance of the surrounding
text.
So if you concentrate on putting bold or italics tags
around your core keywords (while maintaining a natural
flow of content), you will be directly improving the chances
of a search engine spider ranking that page higher for
those keywords.
Similarly, if you have an important list of points that
you want to emphasize (or perhaps summarize), you could
put them in an ordered (numbered) list or just a plain
bulleted list on your page this will set that
portion of text apart and alert the search engine spider
that this text is more important.
The Image Tag
This is an interesting tag because it s not that widely-used,
and when some webmasters do use it they tend to stuff
the tag with keywords in a futile attempt to influence
search engines.
The Image tag is supposed to help the search engines
read into what the image that you are displaying
is about thus the need to plug in your relevant
keywords into the tag. Note that if your image is, let's
say, a picture of a hiking resort and your website is
an adventure tours business, then you might plug in keywords
that relate to hiking resorts remember to
focus on the core keywords for that page and not just
the website on the whole.
About the author: Brad Callen
SEO Professional, owner of http://www.seoelite.com/ and Internet
Marketing Consultant for http://www.textlinkbrokers.com/
. Any reproduction of this article needs to have
an html link pointing to http://www.textlinkbrokers.com/ |
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