Basic SEO: Focus on Quick Optimization Techniques

By Brad Callen

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optimization is obsolete - that the only thing that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 theres 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

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