Make a Website Great

The process of search engine rank optimization, i.e. the attempt to intentionally cause search engines to bring your site more traffic, consists of three parts:

1. Keyword Selection – The research you do to ascertain which of the phrases that people type into the SE search box you want your Web site to be found for. (In search engine optimization speak, the term keyword refers to the phrase searched for, and can therefore consist of one or more words, but it’s still called a keyword.)
2. On Page Optimization – Things you do to your Web pages to make search engines think the pages are highly relevant to those searched phrases.
3. On Site Optimization – Things you do on your Web site in places other than the actual page you’re trying to rank in order to rank it high.
4. Off Page Optimization (and off site) – Things you do to make search engines think that other Web sites think your pages are good. Effectively this involves getting other Web pages to link to yours.

In this article we’ll be dealing with #2 and a little bit of #3.

A few months back a friend with a local New York business came to me for help with search engine optimization (SEO). He had a list of keywords he wanted his site to be found with on Google, such as “new york search engine optimization”, “nyc search engine optimization”, “new york city search engine optimization”, etc. (he’s obviously not a SE optimizer, and I’m just using those keywords just as an example.) He protested that a friend of his had a Web site for much less time, yet his friend’s site ranks well for some of these keywords, while his is not.

I looked at the site and immediately noticed a glaring problem. None of the desired keywords were actually present in the site’s text!

After a few tweaks to the site’s main page, such as adding keywords to the title, text, etc., and presto, top rankings for the desired keywords.

Many businesses already have established Web site, with a good number of quality links, but they’re missing out on tons of free search engine traffic because they haven’t been designing their pages with search engines in mind.

If you are in this situation, this article is precisely for you. If you don’t have an established Web site, you’ll have to select your keywords, do everything detailed here, and add link building, which is a topic for another article.

Two Approaches to Search Engine Optimization

There are effectively two approaches to SEO, easy and hard. The hard one is where SEO experts try to figure out exactly how search engines determine page rankings and tailor pages to conform to that exact formula. Some go as far as creating separate versions of a page for each of the major search engines. The easy one involves using general guidelines to create pages that are obviously about the targeted keywords, without appearing too eager to please and raising suspicion.

The hard approach results in higher rankings, but with exponentially growing difficulty, that in my opinion is usually not worth the effort. In this approach, you first have to do exhaustive testing of a search engine’s reaction to various attributes of your pages, or hire search engine optimization consultants who already did that testing. You then have to build your pages to precise and restrictive specifications that may not necessarily be congruent with the nature of the topics you want to include in your Web site. What’s worse is that search engine algorithms change, so what’s precisely optimal today, may not be so tomorrow, and therefore you’ll have to change your pages to keep current. This is called “chasing search engine algorithms.”

That’s why I prefer to take the easy approach. I find that my time is much better spent increasing traffic trough building of new pages, rather than trying to capture every precise detail of SEO.

SEO The Easy Way

The easy approach to SEO looks at the big picture of what the search engines are trying to accomplish rather than the details of how they accomplish this. What search engines want to accomplish is simple: Bring up the best relevant results given the search phrase entered.

Therefore, the staple of easy SEO is to feed into the search engines’ goal and author Web pages that are relevant to the targeted search phrases (a.k.a keywords). We will write relevant pages, help the search engines understand that the page is about our targeted search phrases, while at the same time avoid seeming too eager about our efforts, lest we be suspected of cheating.

Here’s Exactly What You Need to Do

Once you have decided on a keyword to target do the following:

1. Write a page that’s relevant to the topic described by the keyword. Don’t be too short. Make your text at least 300 words long. The longer the better, as long as you can keep the reader’s attention and stay on topic. Don’t mix different topics on the same page.

You will reach a point of diminishing returns beyond which more text won’t help much. I can’t tell you exactly what that point is, but there’s probably not much advantage to including more than 2000 words. If you find that your article goes very long and it makes logical sense to split it into more than one topic, do that. And then you can target different keywords on each page. However, if your topic demands a long article, it won’t hurt you.

2. Include your exact keyword twice in the body of the text. The first instance should be as close to the beginning of the text as makes sense to the flow of the article.

If it’s a short two word keyword and the nature of the article absolutely requires it, you may include the keyword more times, but definitely don’t make an effort to over-stuff the article with your keyword in an un-natural way.

If you really need to use your phrase more than twice, it’s no big deal as long as the article requires it, but you can use variants of your keyword instead of the exact keyword itself to avoid over-usage. For example, if your keyword is “search engine optimization consultants”, use “SEO consultants”, “SE optimization consultants”, etc. In fact, if you include variants, you’re likely to be found by people searching those as well.

3. Include your keyword in the page’s header, and make sure your header is within an <h1> tag. In HTML, the <h1> tag designates the main header of the page, and therefore, it’s the most important indicator of what the page is about.

If you look at your page’s source code, the <h1> tag should be something like this:

<h1>On-Page Search Engine Rank Optimization for Dummies</h1>

Back in the early days of the Web, the only simple way to include a large bold title on your page was to use an <h1> tag. But with the advent of cascading style sheets, any tag can be made to look like something else. Therefore, some Web sites style their titles without using the <h1> tag. Sometimes a generic <div> tag is used. This is a mistake. Why make the search engines guess, when you can very clearly let them know where the page’s main header is? If you’re using a blog template, or any other template, that is not using an <h1> tag for a main page header, then change it.

If it’s awkward to use the exact targeted keyword in the header, then use a variant. For example use New York Law Offices, which is sharper sounding than Offices of a New York Lawyer. But by all means, unless your targeted keyword is really weird, do make a great effort to work it into the title.

Don’t place your header keyword too far from the beginning of the header. Preferably place it no more than 5 words from the beginning. And don’t make the header text too long. Keep it short and to the point, as the extra words will dilute the significance of your targeted keyword. For example this is a bad header because the keyword comes at the end of a long preamble: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Search Engine Optimization and Positioning

4. Include your keyword in the site’s <title> tag. The <title> tag is found in the page’s HTML header section, which is enclosed within the <head> tag. The job of the HTML header section is to hold information about the page, but not to display visible elements, which is the job of the body section. Here’s an example of a title tag within the HTML header section:

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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
...potentially some stuff...
<title>On-Page Search Engine Optimization for Dummies</title>
...potentially more stuff...
</head>
...the rest of the page...

Originally, the only purpose of the title tag was to tell the browser what to display on the browser window’s title bar, located at the very top of a browser’s window. But now, search engines also use this title as the displayed text for the links on the search results page, and we care about this purpose much more.

In the image below, the red arrow marks the link text taken from the header <title> tag, while the red brackets mark the link’s description taken from either the meta description (discussed later) or the page’s text.

Search Engine Results

The same keyword rules that apply to the page’s <h1> header (not to be confused with the title of the <title> tag) apply to the title. However, since search engines have a character display limit for their search result links, keep your page’s title to 64 characters or under. Otherwise your title will appear with an ellipsis (…), and search engine users won’t see the rest of it. Furthermore, studies have even shown that the presence of an ellipsis reduces click-through rates.

There’s one more important thing to keep in mind. Since the title is what the search engine user sees, why not write it in a way that entices a click.

Instead of,
Search Engine Optimization
Write,
Need Search Engine Optimization? Let Us Supercharge Your Ranks

Give the user a reason to click and enter your page.

5. Include your keyword in the site’s <meta> description tag. Like the <title> tag, the <meta> description also resides in the HTML header. Here’s a code example for the <meta> description:

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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
...potentially some stuff...
<meta name="description" content="Realize the fullest potential of your Web site with our search engine optimization consultants.  Rank your site high with our expert SEO." />
...potentially more stuff...
</head>
...the rest of the page...

Notice the name=”description” attribute of the <meta> tag. The <meta> tag is a generic header tag meant to specify different kinds of information about a Web page. The name attribute specifies what type of information is given.

In this case, the <meta> description is designated to be a short summary of what the page is about. It doesn’t affect the visible content of the page in any way, however the search engines will sometimes use it, or portions of it on the search results pages just below each link. The description text is normally used by search engines if it contains the keyword searched on. If the description doesn’t contain the searched keyword, the search engines may use an expert from the page’s text.

Search engines place some importance on the content of the <meta> description to determine the pages relevancy to the searched term, however since that description does not actually appear on the visible page, it is of secondary importance. And this is why one school of thought dictates that the description should include a slight variation of the targeted keyword, rather than the exact keyword itself as to not appear too eager to please and trigger suspicion of spam. For example, if your keyword is “SEO expert”, in your description you may want to include “SEO experts” instead, or even split the keyword by inserting a word or more inbetween, e.g. “SEO top expert”.

And also, keep your description to 140 characters or less.

6. Include your keyword in the site’s <meta> keywords tag. The <meta> keywords tag is conceptually similar to the description tag, only that instead of including sentences, it should include a comma separated list of keywords that describe what the page is about:

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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
...potentially some stuff...
<meta name="keywords" content="search engine rank optimization, search engine tutorial" />
...potentially more stuff...
</head>
...the rest of the page...

The intention of the <meta> keywords tag is to let search engines know what keywords the page should be listed under. But it’s nearly useless for public search engines because anyone can list a million totally irrelevant keywords there. And that’s why very little weight is given to this tag, but if you use it conservatively, listing a few of your main targeted keywords only, it can’t hurt.

7. Put an image on your page that relates to your topic. Name the image file after your main targeted keyword, or a close variation, separating words with dashes (-). Also include your keyword in the alt and title attributes of the <img> tag. For example, your HTML code for the image, could be as follows:

<img src="/images/search-engine-optimization-tutorial.jpg" title="Search Engine Optimization Tutorial" alt="Search Engine Optimization Tutorial">

8. Link to your page from at least one other page on your Web site, using your targeted keyword (or a close variation) as anchor text. This is the only item on the list that’s part of on-site optimization, but it’s closely related to on-page optimization since it specifically targets the page being optimized, it just does so from other pages on the site.. The preferred method of linking is from within the body of an article. However, this requires you actually discuss or mention the topic of your page on another page. If you find that unfitting, just add a further reading, or related articles section from which to link.

Here’s an example of linking from an article’s body: This article is about on-page search engine optimization. As you may know, link building is also a very important part of the SEO equation. You can learn more about link building and creative Internet web site promotion here.

Here’s the HTML code for one of the links above:

<a href="/creative-link-building-and-internet-web-site-promotion/">link building</a>

9. If you’re optimizing a new page other than the home page, include your targeted keyword in the page’s file name. For example, if your keyword is “search engine optimization help”, name your page search-engine-optimization-help.html. (The suffix that comes after the period depends on the type of server technology you use.) If it’s an existing page that already brings in search engine traffic, then keep the name as is.

10. Use a <b> tag to bold, or an <i> tag to italicize one occurrence of your targeted keyword. Not critical, but it can help.

Optimizing for Multiple Keywords

It’s certainly possible to optimize a single page for many keywords. The number of keywords you can optimize a page for is only limited by the space you have in the various on-page elements that need to include those keywords, most notably the header and title. A page can also be partially optimized for many more keywords that you include in the article but not the header, title, etc.