SEO On-Page Optimization Fundamentals for Small Businesses

When a business decides it needs a website, the instinctive step is to go find a website developer to design and build a site. Let’s assume the resulting website is fantastic, complete with easily navigated pages, packed full of useful content. The consumers that you send to the website are ‘Wowed’, but as time passes, traffic to your site is not what you hoped.  All of the expectations of masses of traffic and hungry prospects looking for your product or services have disappeared.

You want to drive qualified traffic to the website, so you consult a Search Engine Marketer, who starts talking about “SEO” which will generate targeted traffic.  Next, you’re being told that you have to find a website developer who can also change the site coding.  Unless you like paying double for the same work, it makes sense to get the job done right the first time out.

The following are the primary SEO On-page Optimization Fundamentals to ensure that your site is well-positioned from the Search Engines’ perspective, once you’ve identified the select keywords that will help drive pre-qualified customers to your site:

Page Title Tag – the page title tag is what flashes up on the screen when a website page is displayed at the very top left of the page.  The Page Title is also displayed in the search engine results.  You need to use your primary targeted keyword at least once in your page title, twice if you can, but use it wisely.

Meta Description Tag – another key element for website SEO is the Meta description tag – this is used by the search engines to help determine how important your website is, but it also serves as the text which a search engine will return to users in the Search Results page.

Header Tags – these are the H1, H2 tags and so on – which are used to emphasize subtitles and text on your website and also used by search engines to help determine the relevancy of your page relative to the search term input by the user.

Website Content – if you are expecting search engines to rank you for a specific keyword term, it logically follows that your content should have the keyword included where applicable.

Alt Image Tag – with graphical elements, you should use your targeted keyword with a relevant alt-image tag as well. This helps search engines index your site’s media better and serves as a helpful caption to your images for your users.

Takeaway

Keyword research and implementing SEO On-page Optimization Fundamentals should be completed in-parallel with website development. Web developers are typically not SEO practitioners. Keeping these fundamentals at the top of your consideration list will help you rank prominently for the targeted keywords that are meaningful for your Small Business.

The thirst for information is what drives people to use search engines, and in turn giants such as Google and Bing have been built based upon quickly satisfying that thirst.  The search engines look to deliver the most relevant websites first to users searching on keywords, but SEO is in part, working out how to tweak a website so it is favored by the search engine gods and users get to see it first.

There are websites which have been built up as enormous repositories of content.  Wikipedia is a good example, where volunteers write and edit entries and have propelled the site to the top of many search results on an extremely long and eclectic list of keywords.  Wikipedia is a not a commercial outfit, but there are many websites which are – they are usually referred to as “Content Farms” by supporters and detractors alike.

How Do Content Farms Work

Let’s take a well-known content farm – Demand Studios.

Demand Studios uses a large network of freelance writers, typically stay-at-home moms and students looking to make an extra buck.  A list of title topics is generated using an algorithm which has identified popular keyword and phrases.  The freelance writer, usually made a very small fee, is then required to “churn out” an article based on that specification.  Demand Studios publishes the piece along with the million other pieces it is creating each month (that is four times the size of Wikipedia…each month).

This body of content, algorithmically controlled, means that many of its webpages are returned in the top results pages of a search engine.

So what’s the problem with that?

On the face of – it not a lot.

Demand Studios has managed to generate a massive traffic flow to its sales sites and commercially it has been a huge success.  Currently, Demand Studios is going through an IPO (Initial Public Offering) and shareholders are set to make a fortune.

On the other hand, search engines don’t particularly like it.  The content is generally considered to be of poor quality and not holding much real value for readers. In extreme instances, the content farm information is likened to spam – which is a very bad reputation to create.

Google’s Matt Cutts is critical of content farms, though he makes sure not to name any.  This is an especially sensitive subject for Google, who have to deal with a growing user perception that its results are too “spammy”.  Cutts goes on to outline the changes Google is making to combat “content spam” so users get better quality sites ranking in preference to content farms and other spammy sites.

What Does This Mean for Your Website?

Creating content is a professional skill – it takes creative talent coupled with an understanding of SEO requirements to generate engaging content.  Your content is going to be read by two sets of readers – the search engine spiders and real human beings (aka your next customers).

Website content walks a fine line between SEO optimized, so the search engines see you and rank you highly, and being able to interest and engage real people.

Real people include not only your potential customers, but also other websites which may linkback to you because you are offering such interesting information. Regular visitors may link to you through email or more likely, to their online social networking friends, if you are delivering something they really like.

Who Do You Create Content For?
Do you create a website which the search engines are going to love, or should you just write for real people and trust to word of mouth referral?

The answer is to write for both sets of readers, but put the real people first.

A skilled SEO writer or content creator will be able to deliver highly engaging content which real people will want to read, but at the same time satisfies SEO requirements.  This does take time – time to learn about your business and marketing goals, understand who your target audience is and grasp the key elements of your products and services, as well as come up with the content itself.

This is not cheap.  A content farm freelancer is probably getting paid $2 for 200 words, and in some instances even less – a good webpage with engaging content and written well is going to cost a great deal more, sometimes hundreds of dollars depending on the subject matter and purpose behind the website.

What is the payback for creating good content?

As the search engines actively root out content spam, we can expect sites relying on poor quality content to slip down the rankings.  Publishing good quality content is going to get you promoted and the trend is now definitely driving towards quality rather than quantity.

You will also find quality content is more readily linked to by external websites and ordinary visitors.  Increasing link backs is also going to boost your search engine rankings and forms an important part of your overall rank value.

Most of all, publishing good quality content will help you maximize your conversion rates, because it is in the content that your sales message is found. Ultimately, your websites commercial success depends on generating engaging content which satisfies real people rather than wasting their time with “Ten Ways to Massage a Dog”.

Takeaway

Create quality content over quantity – both are important, but quality is more important than quantity.

Avoid creating or publishing anything which the search engines may consider “spammy”.

Ultimately, your content should be written to engage real people instead of putting SEO and the search engines first, though this can be a very fine line requiring professional SEO help and advice.

Quality content attracts more and better quality links from external websites and other users.

Better quality content converts prospects better than poor content.

Use a professional SEO content producer and expect to pay a proper rate for the work.

Check your website for these simple SEO mistakes using our quick and easy checklist to ensure you maximize your website’s potential. There are hundreds of ways in which you can optimize a website, and even the professionals overlook some of the most obvious ones. No matter how good you think your website is, take a few moments to check it against this list and don’t miss out on getting those higher rankings.

Your Website is 100% Flash

You can easily check this one by navigating to the home page – look at the URL and see if it changes.  If you click on a link and the URL shows up as domainname.com/page.html then you are probably going to be OK; but if you do have a Flash website, or one which has a lot of Flash elements, you need to make sure you have plenty of content around it which is not.

Why?

Because Flash cannot be accessed by search engines and so the content is not archived and you get no search engine credit for ranking.

Check You Have 100% Original Content on Each Webpage

Duplicating content is not advisable – the search engines will look at all the duplicated content and determine which page is going to get the credit.  All the other pages are going to get penalized.

This is why you should not take other people’s content (content scraping), nor should you use the same content repeatedly on different websites or on multiple pages within your own website.

Common errors include simply cutting and pasting manufacturers’ product descriptions in your own website, or using a news article verbatim, or simply plagiarizing someone else’s webpage.  Get a writer to rewrite your copied content so it is completely original. Use Copyscape to check your content is 100% original – don’t worry, it’s free.

Failing to Link Your Domain Name to the “True” Homepage

A very common mistake is where the domain name does not link to the “true” homepage.  Check your URL for the homepage – it should say, http://DOMAINNAME.com, but you may find it says http://DOMAINNAME.com/index.html

The index.html part is a copy of your “true” homepage which other websites are not going to use to link to. External websites will instead link to http://DOMAINNAME.com rather than the URL with the /index.html and that will decrease the ranking value for the site.

Splash is web coding some designers use to create a movie-like homepage or landing page for the website. Problem is that like Flash, the search engines can’t see the content and you get no ranking credit.  In addition, users see the big warm-up as an obstacle to getting to the content which is behind – save them the trouble and avoid the risk of the back-browser being hit and put your content up front and center.

Your website is not a Hollywood blockbuster production – give ‘em the beef straight away!

Are Your Title Tags Unique?

You’re looking to make each single page on your site as unique as possible.  Title tags describe each web page and what’s on it, so it comes as no surprise they are used when returning search results and the link description in their results. Make your title tags snazzy, succinct, informative, makes relevant use of keywords and capable of giving brief information to search engine users which is going to whet their appetite to click on your site instead of any of the others in the results.

Are You Using Unique Meta Tags?

Meta tags describe the website and as such they are similar to title tags.  Again the search engines may use the description for users when they are searching for results.  The same advice applies here as for title tags – use them!

Are You Using Alt Tags for Images?

The Alt tag describes images but many people leave them blank or don’t take advantage of them to promote their keywords within the website.  Make sure all of your images are properly described in a relevant way using your keywords and gain extra search engine credit.

Takeaway

Don’t let shoddy website designers forget the real purpose of your website – to get noticed by the search engines and attract real people to your content.

Check the following:

• Flash coding
• Domain name points to the real homepage and not a copy
• Content is 100% original
• Splash homepage or landing page
• Title tags are properly used
• Meta tags are properly used
• Alt tags are properly used

Landing pages have one job – to sell your product or service. This means that landing pages must be uber-relevant, and by that we mean that a user gets all the information they expect to see when they arrive on the page. This said there is a lot of confusion over landing pages, so we’ll be clear on what a landing page is not too.

A Landing Page is Not a Doorway or Start Page

A “doorway” is a webpage which contains optimized keywords which search engine spiders can see; the purpose of a doorway is to lead human users to another page. In practice, a user hits the link in a search engine listing and arrives only to be redirected automatically to another website. This is frowned upon by search engines and human users alike.

A start page will contain lots of different links on different topics of interest. It is common for a start page to be constructed with photographs which act as the “buttons” for links. The problem with start pages is that they frequently contain paid links which search engines will also penalize the site for.

Both these types of web page are commonly used by Black Hat SEO practitioners and are to be avoided.

Landing Page 101

A landing page is the web page which a user gets when they click on either a search engine result or a paid ad.

A landing page is there to persuade and to motivate – in short, they are there to sell! In this respect, a landing page is the tool you use to convert traffic into customers. How landing pages work is not really an SEO issue; to understand how to create a landing page which sells, we turn to the copywriter skills of direct ad men and the decades of experience.

A good landing page structure will consist of the following:

Pre-Headline

A brief, 2-line intro to the landing page placed above the main headline

Headline

The headline has one job: grab the attention of the reader enough to get them to read the rest of the ad. It needs to be 3 things:

1. Attention grabbing;
2. Clear in presenting the purpose of the landing page; and
3. Works in tandem with your banner or ad which the user first clicks on to get to it.

Stick to fonts such as Arial or Verdana because they are easy to read and make sure you use a font size which can be easily read.

Pre-Headline

This is a simple two line introduction to the landing page, just above the headline.

Headline

The headline should do three important things:

• Grabs the attention of the visitor
• States the purpose of the page
• Compliments and coincide with your banner or ad (or the search engine will issue a penalty)

You have only one moment to grab the attention of the visitor, thus, the heading should entice the reader to continue on to the next paragraph or subheading. So choose your words, font style (Arial, Verdana are good choices), font size to your advantage.

Landing Page Body

Your first sentence should be short and to the point – find a factoid to shock or intrigue the reader. The job of the first sentence is to get the reader to read the first paragraph – the first paragraph is to draw the reader into the rest of the landing page where the information is to persuade and motivate the reader to buy the product or service.

Use simple language – there are no bonus points for eschatological, pseudo-intellectual pomposity. Rather, a spade is a spade – keep words simple and to the point.

Break the body up into paragraphs which can easily be scanned – make judicious use of sub-headers to highlight salient information and provide an easy way for readers to zero in on what they are interested in.

Use bullet points.

Sell benefits not features.

Most importantly – issue a Call to Action – this is what you want the reader to do, for instance add the item to a shopping cart, pick up the phone and call the sales office, navigate to another resource. Use “action” words to provide a sense of urgency:

Buy! Now! Free Trial!

Your call to action should be easily seen in several places throughout the landing page (yes, you repeat the call to action more than once – always be selling!)

Keyword Usage

Your landing page should be optimized for the keyword phrases you are targeting with PPC ads and the search engines. This takes us back out of ad copywriting into the realms of SEO again: nowhere else is the balance between keyword rich and keyword stuffing more important. Overuse keywords and the search engine will penalize you, but more importantly, using keywords in an unreadable fashion will destroy the impact of the landing page for human readers too.

Finally, test your landing pages. Frequently you will need to create several landing pages and test them alongside each other to find what works and what doesn’t. Once tested you should also continuously monitor their performance and make changes to see what the impact will be on your results. Clearly, designing a landing page is only part of a reiterative process to maximize traffic and conversions.

Takeaway

A landing page is not a start page or a doorway – these are Black Hat SEO pages and will get you penalized.

A landing page has one job – to sell something.

A well-designed landing page will combine the best of SEO with ad copywriting skills to produce an attention grabbing pitch, which will persuade the reader to do what you ask them to do. Remember that your landing page must Always Be Selling – repeat your call to action throughout the landing page.

Pay special attention to keyword usage – too much and you will be penalized and shunned by search engines and human readers alike.

Video is playing an increasingly large part in rich media content, but this brings problems associated beyond simple production.

Video content east up bandwidth, but site and content speed must be able to handle content delivery or you lose users fast – how do you ensure this happens for your important users?  Once you have a range of rich media content, how do you manage it effectively? How do you make sure that the user is focusing on your site content and not scratching their head wondering why they have an error message on their Smartphone?

3 SEO Tips for Rich Media

There are 3 elements to focus on: the underlying web code, file compression and mobile compatibility.

1.  Optimize Web Code

Optimizing web code will ensure that page and content loading is speeded up.  The stats all support the view that users will quickly hit the back-browser if a video doesn’t load or the page is taking its time to come up.  Forget the stats – just think of your own experience when you are using the web.

Slow sites turn users off – your site must be fast to succeed.

Specifically, look at the following:

(i)                  Combining web script and stylesheets;

(ii)                Split objects across different domains; and

(iii)               Optimize the internal site search function.

With increased speed you gain two benefits – improved user experience and enhanced search engine rankings because site loading speeds are factors in determining site ranking.

2. File Compression

Webmasters typically look to compress large files, but the plethora of smaller files tends to be overlooked.  This is a serious mistake when you are looking for optimal site performance, which by definition means you gain as much speed as is possible.  Compressing smaller files will also help with site loading and content accessing speeds, which in turn will improve user satisfaction and SEO rankings.

3. Mobile Compatibility

More than 50% of online searches are conducted from a mobile device.  That is a stunning statistic which underlines why the Internet giants are investing billions of dollars in mobile search and the mobile web.  Technological and consumer advances are extremely rapid in this area with new devices coming to market almost every day, though realistically the major mobile developments seem to be taking place once a month, e.g. iPhone becomes iPad but in between Android, Googlephone, .mobi domains, multiple browser compatibility upgrades, 4G and much, much more.

Your website has to keep on top of all this and must be compatible with mobile devices which are popular or are becoming so in the consumer market. Ignoring the mobile market means you are discounting half of your potential customers before you even start.

Takeaway

From an SEO perspective there are 3 main areas to optimize your rich content offering: web code, file compression and mobile compatibility.

There are other rich media factors to consider too, particularly in respect of user engagement and convertibility, such as media reach (who can access the content at the quality you provide), video platforms (free or paid for; build or buy) and how you manage and “systemize” rich media assets.

The underlying principal is that the users must be allowed to focus on the content, not how it is delivered and certainly avoid why it is NOT being delivered.

Still, your website images can improve search engine rankings if you know how to enable the search engines to “read” them. This is because of the web coding which is associated with them (we dealt with optimizing your website with the web coding in a previous post).

Before we get into the techniques behind optimizing images for SEO, remember some basic rules for using images and photographs with your human viewers. Do not skimp on the quality of the images and especially photographs; poor image quality will detract from your entire website and the sales message. Use relevant images and ensure your product is front and center; use imagery to convey your product or service being used and in a setting which appeals to the lifestyle aspirations of the target market.

A picture says a thousand words, but it is the words which are most important because they hold the key message for viewers.

Top SEO Tips for Photographs & Images

While search engines can’t look at an image and understand it, there are a number of SEO techniques which can be used.

Use Alt Tags

An alt tag looks like this – alt=”description”, but many tags don’t take full advantage of the opportunity to use your keywords. For instance, “alt=image1” doesn’t tell the search engines anything!

Alt tags were created for human users with visual impairment but the search engine webcrawlers will read them as well. The tag should be used to give an accurate description of the photograph or image and gives you an opportunity to use your keywords, e.g. alt=”café-in-Los-Angeles” or “alt=ford-car-cover.jpg”.

Do not abuse alt tags, especially do not stuff keywords into the description just for the sake of getting your keywords in there and by the same rule, do not use the same keyword twice. Google has people and bots checking sites to read information in html tags for abuse, so if you do abuse alt tags you risk being penalized in the rankings.

Use Title Tags

Title tags look like this – title=”description”.

These are a useful for SEO and interacting with your human users; they are the tag which is responsible for the text which pops up when you hold your mouse cursor over an image and sometimes they are called a “Tooltip”.

The title tag gives you a quick way to give the user more information, a “snapshot in words”. This gives you another way to use your keywords in the text (which will also be scanned by the webcrawlers) as well as adding value for the user experience. The same advice about not abusing alt tags applies to title tags as well.

Use the Image File Name

This is one of the most important factors for SEO purposes, but one of the least used. Try this for yourself – pick a selection of photographs off the web and right click on the image with your mouse. Pick the selection “Save image as…” and see what the name of the image is in your dialog box.

A bad image name will look something like this – “pic1.jpg”, or “ABC.jpg”.

There is no information on what the image actually is, so a good image name will say something about what the image is and this gives you another opportunity to use your keywords and phrases. For instance, “café-in-los-angeles.jpg”, or “ford-custom-car-cover.jpg”; note how the hyphen is used as a separator which the search engines will understand and enables your keywords to be read by the webcrawlers.

Image Size: Bigger is Better

The size of the photograph or image used is not such a factor in search engine ranking, but if you do have the choice it is better to have a bigger image rather than a small one. Google and Bing look to give searchers the best images possible and they take the view that a larger image is of more value than a smaller one.

When you are using this tip be sure you do not sacrifice the quality of the image or its placement on the site; always remember your human users and ensure the graphical context is properly maintained.

Use the Image Folder Name

The image folder on many websites is found in the main htdocs docs and says something as simple as “/images” which is not very useful for SEO. It is usual for multiple images and photographs to be used in creating a website so it makes sense to organize them into sub-folders. For instance, your website is selling customized car covers so take the images for different car models and create a sub-folder for each, e.g. “images/ford-car-covers/”, “images/Chevrolet-car-covers/”, “images/Jeep-car-covers” and so on for each car category.

Takeaway

Search engines cannot “see” an image or photograph, so they don’t directly help your rankings. You can use the tags, image file and folder name to improve your keyword exposure and be read by the search engines which will give a positive benefit to your ranking results.

Understand the purpose of tags and file names and do not abuse them – this is spamming and will penalize your website ranking.

Content is King!

Content alone stands out as the number one factor in determining your search engine rankings!

There is no substitute for fresh, relevant and well presented content both for attracting and retaining surfers and potential customers, nor for persuading the search engines to give you a higher ranking.

The ultimate objective of a search engine, especially Google, is to deliver relevant results to searchers on their search terms – anything you provide on your website which demonstrates how relevant you are is sure tio score you more highly in the ranking results.

By providing great content you not only deliver info that the user is looking for, but you’ll be rewarded for it by natural backlinks from people that truly enjoy what you wrote and or providing.

Use an XML Sitemap

A sitemap is exactly what it says – a map of your site.

There are two kinds –  a static sitemap and an XML sitemap.  The static sitemap is usually used by human surfers and is chart of your website, showing where pages are in relation to one another, as well as how the pages link to each other.

An XML sitemap is used by Google’s web crawlers and is invisible to human users.  Using an XML sitemap will ensure that web crawlers access all of the web pages effectively and that none get missed.

Keyword-formatted URLs

A keyword-format url is simple and easy to read and looks something like this:

http://www.anysite.com/sales/widget

This is easier to use and navigate with compared to the old-style url format which may look something like this:

http://www.anysite.com/widget_987663cp?

Keyword friendly URLs not only help the search engines determine the content and importance of a page, but also helps the users identify the topic of pages by simply looking at the URL.

Meta Tags and Title Tags

Meta tags are used to tell the search engine’s web crawler all about your web page.  They allow web crawlers to index your web page and enhance the visibility of the web page to search engines which provides an advantage in the rankings compared to those web pages without meta tags.

Title tags give the page a description for use by the search engine when it displays the ranking results, and this is frequently the first thing a user will actually see in connection to your site when they come to decide which url they are going to click. Be sure to include your main keyword in your title as well.

You need to optimize the meta tags and meta title tags with your keywords and phrases as well as write them in such a way that they also make sense to human readers.  Do not “keyword stuff” the meta descriptions because this will result in you being penalized.

Use Image Alt Tags for Graphics

Search engine web crawlers are unable to index images because they cannot read them.  One way to impart the information to crawlers is to use the Image Alt Tag – include a short description which is optimized with your keyword and write it in a way so it makes sense to a human reader too.  Be sure that it is an accurate description of the image, as this will help gain extra traffic to your site by those using the Image searches found in most of the search engines.

Avoid Using Graphical Text

As we’ve already seen, web crawlers cannot read graphical images and any text which is graphical will also be unable to be read.  This is a situation which is commonly encountered with text used to describe a graphic and is a further reason why the Image Alt Tag should be used instead.

Use a Robots.txt File

Web crawlers will always look for a robots.txt file on your website because it tells them what they need to index and which web pages should be ignored.  This may seem strange at first that you do not want every page indexed on your site, but there will be occasions when this is beneficial such as  when you are looking to save bandwidth or want to stop web crawlers from indexing irrelevant pages such as feedback forms or your internal search engine tool.

Avoid Duplicating Domains: www and non-www

Many clients maintain websites which are duplicated on www and non-www, for instance:

http://www.anysite.com  the www site; and

http://anysite.com   the non-www site

Effectively you are duplicating content which is usually a very bad thing to do, but in this instance you will not be penalized, however you are spreading the effect of your content and SEO work across two sites for the same purpose.  In other words, use one site or the other but not both – this will ensure all your SEO strategies are focused upon gaining high rankings for one site only and not split between two. You can fix this problem in your htaccess file by forcing all URL’s to either WWW or non WWW.

Build a Good Internal Linking Structure

These are the links through which surfers will navigate between different pages of your web site and may be embedded within the content, or by use of a navigation bar offering a menu of sections and pages of the web site.

The anchor text used for links within the content should be relevant to the page to which it is linking to – this is logical and common sense, but many developers will do something like:

For more information on Rankpay’s SEO services check out our page here

The link would be better placed like this:

You can learn more about Rankpay’s SEO services by following the link.

Internal links are used by web crawlers as the internal doorway to the rest of the web site – if you do not have a good internal linking structure, then the risk is some of your web site will not be indexed by the search engines and therefore you lose out on gaining ranking points.

Using Multiple Keywords and Phrases

As already noted – how many keywords should you use on a web page (all of them, one per page) and how do you address similar key phrases?

Rankpay’s answer is this checklist:

Group Your Keywords and Phrases by Association

We’ll use cars as an example to demonstrate the principles involved here.  A car dealer in Los Angeles is selling a range of car marques – say, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Lincoln and Dodge.

To this end they have amassed keywords and phrases they are interested in targeting:

Car Dealer LA LA Car Dealer Car Dealer in LA

Chevrolet Cars Chevy Truck Chevy Automobile

Chrysler Voyager Chrysler Minivan Chrysler People Carrier

Lincoln Continental Lincoln Luxury Car Lincoln Automobiles

Dodge Truck Dodge Van  Dodge Polara

As you can see, we have already sorted the keywords by association on a line-by-line basis –  generic car dealer phrases; Chevrolet phrases and so on.

Focus on Surfer Intent and Not Search Engine Rank

The next step is to determine which key phrases serve the intention of the surfer – by this we mean using those key phrases which are directly aligned with what the surfer is looking for.

Using Dodge as an example; using all three key phrases may increase search engine ranking for “Dodge”  but this will only dilute the efforts to attract and serve potential customers looking for a car and not a truck – in this instance, to serve the intent of a car buyer, the key phrase which should be used is “Dodge Polara”.

This will have a dramatic effect on conversion rates – ranking first for Dodge may be great but what if your conversion rate is 0.1%?  Ranking 20th for “Dodge Polara” would be better if the conversion rate increases to 2% because you are more focused on what the surfer is looking for, i.e. a car not a truck!

Base the Site Hierachy Around the Keywords and Build Good Internal Linkage

If you are designing a website from scratch, this is obviously easier to do but not so simple when you already have an established website.

It makes a lot of sense to create a simple hierarchy for potential buyers to go through and quickly find the relevant part of your website which has what they are interested in.

In our car example, it makes sense for the following to be included on the home page:

Home Page

Car Dealer LA

Chevrolet

Ford

Lincoln

Dodge

The last four brands will then have a sub-page:

Dodge

Dodge Truck

Dodge Van

Dodge Polara

…and finally, you will create tertiary pages for each – Dodge Truck; Dodge Van and Dodge Polara.

If you already have a website, you may not be able to readily change the site hierarchy, but you can make site navigation easy using good internal links.

The idea is that each page is targeted to the potential customer’s intentions – in practice, this means placing the higher volume keywords and phrases on the home page, and then using good internal linkage using appropriate anchor text.  This will  allow the surfer to move to the specific web page they are interested in very quickly and easily, and  this is also where you will be using the stable of  key phrases in greater variety.

Using Similar Key Phrases

We’ve dealt with the situation where you have multiple keywords and phrases, buy how do you deal with similar phrases?

With our LA car dealer –  are we going to use “LA car dealer”; “car dealer LA”  or “Car Dealer in LA”?

The phrases are similar, but which should we focus on?

Google Adwords provides a simple tool for establishing the relative importance of keyword phrases – Traffic Estimator – this provides data on the search volumes for different keywords and phrases.  Traffic Estimator also gives you a range for what advertisers are paying to use these terms in their Adwords campaigns.  This may not be perfect but, it does provide an indication as to which terms are more valuable for your purposes.

Inputting our car dealer’s terms will tell us which we should be focusing on, but we can also use some intuition.  “LA car dealer” is more likely to be searched on compared to “car dealer LA” – it flows better and without checking it, it feels “right”.  A search term  such as “car LA dealer” is unlikely to rank very highly against any of our chosen terms.

Now we have determined which on the higher volume search phrases, we should concentrate our on-site optimization on those phrases.  This will involve using the search phrase in the url; in the meta data; titles and content several times, but it is important to remember that human beings need to see the page making sense to them too!

Using “car dealer LA”  in your content may be difficult to do and still have the copy make sense, but this is where a good copywriter is worth the money.

Finally, you will then look to optimize the site using a link building strategy employing the key phrase as the anchor text.  Again, you can start using multiple search phrases and indeed, anchor text link building is one of the best ways to achieve top rankings on multiple phrases.  You can also use different search phrases which are more difficult to place content, for instance “car LA dealer”, and other lower ranking phrases to pick up on link juice being ignored by the current top ranking competition.

Takeway

Traffic generation is important, but it is conversion rates which count at this stage.  Conversion ratios are a good measure of how well you are achieving congruence between your SEO strategies and serving potential customers’ needs.

The keyword “tail”  must not be allowed to “wag” the marketing “dog” – your website pages should be relevant and easy to navigate, so no time is wasted on getting a potential buyer to where they need to be – on your order and payment pages completing the sale.

Use association to group keywords; rank them in order of search popularity and focus top-level content on the more important phrases and logically, cascade down into sub-pages with good internal links.

Never forget a human user will determine your conversion rates, not the search engines.

First off, let’s go over what “meta tags” are in the first place.

Meta tags are found in the “head” area of your web pages (near the top of the page’s HTML). Other than a web page’s “Title Tag”, the information in the head area of your web pages is not seen by those viewing your pages. Instead, meta information in this area is used to communicate information to search engine spiders and browsers.

The meta keywords tag allows you to provide additional text for search engines to index. The keyword tag is sometimes useful as a way to help your Web page rank for synonyms, misspellings, or unusual words that don’t appear on the Web page itself.

SO, when it comes to the keyword tag, here’s what we recommend…

First off, make sure you do have the tag on each and every page in your Website. Next, be sure to include keywords related to the central theme of your page. Separate each keyword phrase by a comma and be sure not to include more than ten phrases. Many people believe that you can stuff the keywords tag with as many keywords as you like, but our testing and results don’t agree. Too much of ANY optimization factor is generally is not a good thing.

Here’s an example of properly structured Meta Keyword tag:

<META name=”keywords” content=”furniture, tropical furniture, bamboo furniture”>

So be sure that all of your pages have the tag properly place, it doesn’t take long. If you have any questions about the Keyword Meta Tag, feel free to contact our Support Team within your RankPay account.

Credibility is often measured in how long a particular search engine has known about the page. Of course, the amount and quality of content on the page also matters. So do other factors, like how many other Websites link to your Web page.

The primary way to evaluate the overall credibility of your pages is by viewing it’s Google “PageRank”. The scale runs from 0-10 with ten being the best possible score. PageRank (aka “PR”) is one of the methods Google uses to determine the relevance or importance of a Web page.

Google explains PageRank this way:

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“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query. ”
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It’s important to note that PageRank is not the only determining factor in where your page will be ranked or what the future SEO future holds for you and your Website. There are plenty of examples in which low PR pages rank high in the search engines (usually for keywords that aren’t very competitive). PageRank is just general barometer . . .

How do I view the PageRank of my pages?

You can accomplish this one of three ways:

• Login to your RankPay account and view the PR of the pages you have already assigned to keywords. Do this by clicking on the Active Keywords or Pending Keywords tabs.
• Download and install the Google Toolbar which has a Google PageRank “meter” on it. You can download the GToolbar here: http://toolbar.google.com
• You can also use a Website that has a PageRank tool like PageRank.net.

You can learn more about Google’s PageRank system by visiting the Google site at:

http://www.google.com/technology/