A Beginners Guide To Onsite Optimization
When you go to meet your girlfriend or boyfriend’s parents for the first time, you always want to make a good impression so your relationship gets off to a strong start. The same thing holds true in the relationship between your website and search engines. It must make a good impression.
Here are the basics you need to understand about search engine optimization (SEO) strategies and concepts. This article only covers onsite optimization, not link building, which is another important component of SEO.
Before You Start: Understand The Lingo
If you’re new to SEO, you need to understand what keywords and keyword phrases are. Simply stated, a keyword is going to be the word your visitors use when they do an online search. Someone looking for a place to buy soap would likely use the keyword “soap.”
- Do Check: Keywords: The Basis Of SEO
In practice, many people use the terms keyword and keyword phrase interchangeably.
Here’s a hint. Use the Google AdWords keyword tool to help you find more keywords and phrases.
To get a page search engine optimized, you first need to deal with the part of your webpage that visitors see, and to make life simple, we’ll go from the top to the bottom:
- Page Title
- Content Title
- Actual Content
- Links
If you’re reading this in a browser window right now, the page title is the phrase that appears in the bar at the top of your browser. It’s not part of the webpage in the strictest sense of the word.
Your page title the most important attribute search engines use when they decide what your page is all about. If your page title reads “Welcome” that’s not so good…at least if you want your website to be optimized for search engines.
Try to keep your page title at 65 characters or less and work hard to put your most important keywords or keyword phrase in the title—preferably toward the beginning of your page title.
Content Title
Jumping into your actual page now, there’s probably a major headline or label at or near the top, this is the content title.
The content title also needs to contain your important keywords or keyword phrase. However, it also has to be compelling enough to draw website visitors into actually reading the content on your webpage. This is an important skill to develop.
Page Content
Finally, the article, or textual content, on your pages needs to include your important keywords and keyword phrases. But, as with the content title, you want to do this in a way that meets the demands of both your visitors and the search engines.
Using your keywords and keyword phrases about three to five times for the average length article is probably sufficient. If every other word is a keyword, search engines will begin to suspect that your content is of little value. You need to incorporate your keywords and keyword phrases into your articles in a way that is natural and engaging to readers.
Links To Other Pages
Within the textual content of your pages, you’re almost certain to include some links. SEO concepts apply here as well. The words visitors click on are called the anchor text. Make sure your anchor text includes target keywords for the link destination. Don’t get lazy and allow your anchor text to be something like “click here.”
What About Meta Tags?
Tucked in along with all the HTML code that powers your webpages are meta tags and this brings us to our fifth and final concept and strategy. Search engines used to use some meta tags for ranking, but those days are now gone. However, the meta description tag is what search engines often use for the brief description of your site in their search results. Make sure it is well written, concise, enticing and accurately describes what your website is all about.
These fundamentals are easy to understand and not too difficult to master. If you ever employ anyone else to write website content or design pages for you, make sure they understand these strategies and concepts as well.