SUBMIT 2.0

If you take a look elsewhere on EzineArticles, you’ll find that there are already some articles in this series that talk about how you can increase your ranking etc. using a variety of techniques and that so far, they nearly all involve working ‘off-site’. So far all I’ve explained what to do is to investigate how to get links to your site and how to best exploit them to get your web page creeping up the search results but there’s no explanation on what to do on the pages themselves.

Well, here it is - pretty much all you need to know about getting your website ready for all your visitors and guess what? It’s dead easy!

First of all, we need to dispel a few myths about on-site search engine tactics and we’ll start with one of the biggest and best: keyword density.

Keyword density is a measure of how many times our specific keywords appear within a given text in relation to the number of words in that text. So, if there are one hundred words and your keywords appear 10 times, your keyword density is 10%. Simple. Some SEO experts would have you believe that if you increase the keyword density then you’ll have a better chance at beating your competition in the search results, but this doesn’t appear to be true. Plus, it can actually make your pages look really bad, here’s an example.

In order to try to increase their keyword density, some people include the keyword in paragraphs to the point where it just looks odd. Here’s a poor example:

“This is the best place for SEO training in the UK so if you’re actually after SEO training for your company and you haven’t investigated SEO training before, then this should be your one stop SEO training company”.

Looks awful and reads terribly. The thing is, the bulk of the content of your pages should not be geared at search engines at all, it should be working to get a sale of a human. It’s people that will be viewing your content and therefore people who may be buying stuff, so stick to appealing to them and not machines.

It’s true that the content should contain some relevance to your keywords but again, keep it in an English context that makes sense. If you read it and it doesn’t sound particularly good then odds are that it will look strange to others too and they may be put off making a purchase.

So if we’re not going to be doing keyword density then, what are the main points we should be looking out for? Here’s a run-down:

* Title tag

This is the most important aspect of your on-page SEO and you should take great care to get this right. You only have a little bit of space in which to write your masterpiece, perhaps six words so don’t squander them with “Welcome to our site” or “We wish you a happy Thursday”, just get right down to the nub of the matter and explain your products in a succinct manner:

“Blue marine widgets | Widgets for your boat”

Importantly, you need to make sure you don’t put too many and diverse keywords in your title tag or indeed confusing text on your page. I’ll deal with this in another article in more depth, but just remember that each page should really only have one subject or topic - make it easy for people and you make it easy for the search engines.

* Headings

If you’re not really into your HTML or know nothing about coding your page yourself then you’ll need to talk to your web design company about this next bit. When making up your page you will probably have a line of text at the top as the heading. This is pretty standard and us humans expect it (pretty much how we like headlines in newspapers) but you can use this to your advantage in both enticing your customers and in increasing your page relevance.

If you include your keywords in the heading then you are increasing the relevance on the page in relation to them. You can’t be as blatant as in the title but you can be quite frank. For example:

“Excellent blue widgets from widget guy”

* Links

I discuss external links in another article but you should also consider links within your pages too. A link on a page to another one of your pages is just as important as links from outside your website, but you need to form them correctly.

Remember that the Internet was created as a method of getting information out to people and the World Wide Web was designed with this in mind. So, it is expected that certain words will link to others. You should exploit this to link to other parts of your website and make your general page content more clear, but you should also make sure that the words you use relate to the page you’re going to.

For the purposes of this article, you only really need to consider the fact that you should never simply use the words ‘click here’ if you are taking people to other parts of your site. Instead, turn the words that you are explaining on the target page as the anchor text, making sure that it’s those words that actually link to the page in question.

If you get all of those points sorted on your site, then you’re not a million miles away from having a fairly well optimised experience for both your customers and the search engines.

Source: Ezinearticles

Filed under: Web-Site-SEO