- You are here:
- Home »
- Suggestions
- » SEO Lessons from the Field 1
SEO Lessons from the Field 1
This is the first of a series of posts we are going to publish on state of the art search engine optimization techniques to help you rank your site organically in the top search engines as high as possible for your top keyword phrases.
There are two main areas that search engines consider when they’re deciding how to rank your page and the first is what you publish on your page and how relevant that is to what people are actually searching for. We call these on-page elements. The good news is that you can optimize on-page elements easily. All you need to do is edit the text on your website.
The second thing the search engines look at is how popular your site is on the internet.
- How many other sites are linking to you?
- Do you have important authority sites linking to you?
- What text do such sites use to link to your site?
These are called off-page elements and we will address them in the next post on this topic.
On-page elements are important in determining your rankings but off-page elements are even more important. You’re unlikely to get to the #1 spot in Google, MSN or Yahoo purely because of your on-page elements, but they could mean the difference between being on page 3 or page 1 – So be sure to read Lesson 2 in this series for some off-page tips.
Here are a few critical on-page elements that you need to optimize in order to get reasonable organic listings for your keyword phrases.
Ensure that your <title> tags include the keyword phrase that you are optimizing for.
<title></title> tags indicate the title of your web page and gives the search engines a strong clue as to what a specific web page is about. This text appears on the very top of your browser window when you are on a given web page and this very same text is what the search engines will display in their organic listings as the clickable text link to your site. So, it’s really important that your <title> tags contain the keywords that you’re optimizing that particular page for.
For example:
If you wrote an article about how to read text faster, then the title of the page could be:
How to read text faster | Read Text Faster.
notice that I used the separator ‘|’ to boost the importance of my keywords for this page: this is an easy and natural way of doing it. You can use another separator if you wish, the idea is to present your keywords clearly for both users and search engine consumption.
Ensure that your <h1> tags include the keyword phrase that you are optimizing for.
Search engines read H1 tags first to find out what your page is about like headlines in a newspaper. If the search engine spiders discover your most important keywords in your <h1> tags, your page will be seen as more relevant for that search term and you will rank higher.
In your first 50 words of text be sure to include your keyword phrase.
Many search engines pay more attention to the first 50 words on a page than to the rest of the content on that page so be sure to include your keywords at least once within the first 50 words for each page you publish.
Keyword density: at least once in every 100 words of text on your page, incorporate your keywords and keyword phrases.
Your keywords need to appear a few times on your page integrated into the text but not more than 4 times for every 100 words. This is also known as 4% keyword density. If you go any higher than 4%, your site may be penalized for using a spam tactic.
Your internal site links need to include your keywords.
Search engines use the words in your link text (otherwise known as “anchor text”) to estimate the nature of the page you’re linking to. This can be used to your advantage in your on-page SEO efforts, giving your pages a little boost for your keywords.
We have many Clients who struggle to rank well in the search engines until they understand the importance of this tactic. Prior to working with us, they insisted on having a link on their site called ‘Home’. These people are actually optimizing their home page for the word “home” when they should be optimizing it for their main keyword instead! If they were to change the text “home” to “Read Faster Home”, or “Improve Reading Comprehension home”, they would give themselves a boost for “read faster” or “improve comprehension”. If your keyword for a page is “optimize your website”, then link to it from your menu using the text “optimize your website”, or “How to optimize your website”.
The same goes for all pages on your site. Don’t ever link to a page on your site using “Click here” unless you’d like to rank well for the phrase “click here”.
Original content means that visitors will spend more time on your site.
The search engines don’t want to display twenty sites with the same content. It doesn’t provide a good experience for their users. So you’ll find that many search engines have implemented “duplicate content penalties” for sites that seem to be displaying content very similar to content found on other website(s).
So what do you do if your content is the same as someone else’s?
This happens quite often, particularly if you’re using content from private label rights (PLR) articles, where hundreds of other people might be doing the same thing. The trick is to reword the article to make it unique. Shuffle the paragraphs, use synonyms, and try to change the article by at least 50%, and preferably more to be on the safe side.
Get the best quality content that you can for your site, because the search engines will also pay attention to how long people spend reading your pages. The longer visitors stay on your pages, the more relevant your site appears to the search engines for the keywords you have optimzed the page for. If visitors leave your site within a few seconds, the search engines may interpret this action as a poor fit for your keyword phrases. So try to write text that your visitors would be interested in and thus, try to increase the amount of time visitors spend on your site.