SEO – On Page Optimization Tips

There are two parts to SEO: on page optimization and off page optimization. Off page optimization involves all the things that happen off your website (like link building) that affect your search engine rankings, while the on page optimization is what happens on your website. Both are very important to your visibility on the search engines. We are going to look at a few great tips to ensure that your website is as search engine friendly as possible.

SEO On Page Optimization Tip #1: Your title tags are THE tags. Thats right, your title tag is the most important META tag on your website. You need to make sure you get your primary keyword in there first. So many times you will see a website put the name of the company first in the title tag. Big mistake. Remember, people are not necessarily searching for the NAME of your company, they are looking for a product or service, i.e. SEO. Another mistake is to try and put too MANY keywords in your title. You will not rank for much this way as you are diluting the main keyword phrase. Lastly, don’t duplicate your title tags across your website. You have a great opportunity here to rank for many keywords over many pages.

SEO On Page Optimization Tip #2: Use your image alt tags. This is overlooked too often. When ever you place an image on your page you have the chance to tell search engines exactly what that image is about. As you know search engines can’t read pictures, so if you use the alt tag smartly you can get a few more vital keywords into your webpage. NOTE: Don’t use this excessively! If you have lots of pictures on your page there is no need to label every single one, it may be seen as spamming.

SEO On Page Optimization Tip #3: Take advantage of your header tags. You header tags (H1, H2, H3) are an awesome way to put extra weight on your most important keywords. Many websites that I take a look at choose to ignore this for some reason. A good way to use you H1 tag is use the main keyword you are going for on that particular page. And where do you find that? Well is should be the first few words of your title tag, right?

SEO On Page Optimization Tip #4: Interlinking your webpages is like link building, on page style! The idea is to link to your main pages within the body of your text. Sounds easy enough, well too many people don’t do this. If you have a fairly large website and interlink properly, you will see your rankings drastically improve. Two things to remember:

1. Put more weight on your ‘money’ pages. So link to the pages that you actually want to rank for.

2. Use the correct anchor text. If you are going for the keyword SEO Online Specialists then use that as your anchor text.

Those are four excellent SEO on page optimization tips that you can apply to your website to help increase its visability on the web!

Interlinking – The Great Link Opportunity

Oh boy, this is an oldie, but a goodie. I see this time and time again on websites. Webmasters are missing out on the ideal opportunity to channel their PageRank and funnel it to the most important pages on their website. It still amazes me how many websites miss out on this opportunity.

Great Link Opportunity #1: Your Logo

Many websites these days are built from CMS systems. Two popular ones that come to mind are WordPress and Joomla. The reason being it makes it very easy for the average Joe to have their own website without having any real technical skills. For these types of websites you might notice that the name of your blog or your logo will directly link to the homepage. The thing is, many pages that are not made from CMS systems like this forget to link the logo to the home page. This is a great interlinking chance gone astray.

Great Link Opportunity #2: Use your menus.

If you do use a CMS, you have little say on the structure of your menus. WordPress for example, will automatically add links to the pages in the horizontal menu and posts to the vertical menu on your site. While this may work you could also try and make links on the footer. Create a footer menu and you can channel your PageRank to the most important pages on your site. Remember, it is not completely necessary to link to EVERY page on your website from the footer menu, only the most important pages on your site, i.e. your money pages.

Great Link Opportunity #3: In content linking.

Within your pages you should have your main targeted keywords sprinkled around your content. These keywords are awesome anchor text opportunities. What what you need to to do is link these keywords to the relevant page they are related too (i.e. if you are trying to rank for the term link building, then use that as anchor text to link to the page that you are trying to rank for.)

These are some great ways to take full advantage of internal linking on your website.

Know Your Enemy Part 2 – On Page Assault

In the previous know your enemy, we looked at finding keywords that are relevant to your business. We then discussed using those keywords to find out who your competitors are. These are two great ways to size up your competition and ensure that you are going about your SEO campaign the correct way, finding lucrative keywords with not too much competition and then building your website accordingly. Next we need to look a little deeper into the competition. You need to ask yourself 3 questions:

• What are they doing right?
• What are they doing wrong?
• What can you do to improve on them?

When analyzing a competitors website there are a few things you should look at. Firstly, look at their META tags. If you are unsure about what META tags are, read this. See if they have their primary keyword in their title tag. What does their description say? How many keywords do they have in their keyword tag? If there are too many, you can better this by putting 3-7 keywords that are extremely relevant to your website.

Look for H1 etc. tags. Are there any? Are there too many? This will give you a good idea of what they are doing to rank for your keyword. Next look at their navigation. Is it clear to the user and search engines what the purpose of it is? If so, can you see a way to improve on it for your own website?

Look at their URL‘s. Are they keyword rich? You will need to make sure yours are to give you that extra edge in the SERP’s. There is no point in having unfriendly URL’s. There are two problems with them. Search engines dont like them and neither do people. Many people will be reluctant to click on an ugly looking address.

OK, so you have analyzed the on page factors and you are ready to build your site and get it exposed.

Whats the next step? We will cover that soon!

Content Is King – Make It Work For You

The world wide web is a collection of billions of pages of content. You can access this content at the click of a button. Some is good, some is bad and some is just downright ugly. As a website owner the content on your website is what will seperate you from the rest of the pack. This is why, in our day and age on the internet, content is king. For this very reason, if you ever hope of making a success of an online venture, you need to make sure that your content is smartly written and very good. You need to do something to stand out from the rest of the crowd. Here are a few ideas on how to make sure your content works for you – SEO style!

Keyword research is the first and definitely one of the most important steps to ensuring your content will ever be seen by the masses. The idea here is to make sure that you craft your content (webpages) around keywords that people are actually searching for. And how do you do this? Read about the best free keyword research tool. This way you will get a great idea of how you should be building your website and creating your content to maximize your SEO potential.

Theme your pages. This cannot be overlooked. There are so many websites that try to target a whole lot of different keywords on a single page. This is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. It is extremely difficult to rank for more that one or two of your main keywords per page. What I like to do is theme pages around one or two keywords max. After you have done your keyword research, group your keywords together theming ones that are HIGHLY relevant together.

Write your content. I am sure you have heard the age old saying “failing to plan…” Well this is ever so true on the net. You have researched your keywords, themed your keywords and now you are ready to write some great content. As a rule of thumb I always try to make my website pages around 500 words. I think this is a good amount of content to have on one page.

So remember content is king – plan ahead and maximize your websites web presence!

How To Over Optimise Your Website.

Read an interesting article here about not over optimising your websites. I would like to add a few words to that. I have seen many website owners fall into this trap. What happens is that people get far to keen on trying to rank for a specific keyword that they lose track of the big picture. And what is that? Well, you are building a website for HUMANS and not for search engines. This is the fundemental idea behind having a website.

SO how can you over optimise your website?

First trap I see many people fall into is in their meta description tags. Stuffing you title, description and keyword tags with as many relevant keywords as possible is not going to do you any good. Remember you should be theming your pages around one to two keywords max.

Going heading crazy! Overuse of your heading tags will also probably raise some alarms. You should not have more that one <h1> tag and try and keep the h2-3 down to a minumum of two per page.

Keyword density. This is a little bit of a grey area. Obviously you can’t completely stuff a page full of keywords, but you don’t want to be too light on your main keyword either. Recommended: Stick to a density of around 2% and you should be fine.

It is easy for webmasters to get over eager and over optimise their sites thinking that they will rank better in the SERPS. Don’t let that be you!