On Page Optimisation Walkthrough

A well planned search engine optimisation campaign management should always start with on page optimisation. As the name already suggests, this part of a search engine optimisation will optimise key elements on-page.

To start the on-page optimisation process, keyword research is the paramount of importance. This will ascertain the most relevant keywords related to your site’s theme. Another important factor that should be considered here is the search volume of each keyword you are analyzing.

There are various free keyword analyzing tools available today, with wordtracker, keyword discovery and the Google Adwords keyword suggestion tool been the most used ones.

Once you have a list of keywords that you are happy with, it’s time to start implementing those keywords on the right places on your website’s pages.

The most important on page optimisation element are the title tags. The title tag is the first thing search engines robots look at when they crawl a page, and it’s given a very high importance by the search engines so it’s crucial to add you keywords to your title tags.

Another good place to add your keywords is in the meta description and keywords tags, these meta tags are not as important as they used to be, but since search engines normally displays the meta description tags as the text snippet under the link to your site on the SERPs, writing compelling meta description tags can make your site stand out on the SERPs and instigate searchers to click through your link.

Headers are another important element that should be given special attention, search engines give a high importance to headers, especially the H1 headers or H1 tags, adding your keywords to these tags can help improve the rankings for these keywords.

Since the search engines are not good in reading images you will need to use special tags to tell the SE what the image represents, these special tags are called ALT tags. Again an important place to add your keywords and always use a meaningful file name to your images, for instance “dog-playing-with-ball.jpg” is much better than “DC23124.jpg”.

The content or the text of your pages should also be optimised. Optimise your content in a way that suits both your visitors and the search engines. Don’t stuff your content with keywords; try to use synonyms and variations of your keywords. By en-bolding the odd keyword, this also high lights important text to the search engines, once again care must be taken to not look artificial.

All This Talk about Link Building

These days, trying to improve your website search engine ranking can be a long and frustrating nightmare. Being a search engine optimisation specialist and having established my own business in SEO, many clients seem to be confused about the long process of how to build website presence in the search engines and many think it can b e achieved overnight.

Having built my own site from scratch and having struggled to get the desired ranks, one thing is for sure, it does take time.

Many seem to believe that link building will get you the desired ranks in no time. That is quiet wrong. Whilst there is a lot of talk about link building, many seem to forget the basics of website optimisation (content, coding and tags). Search engines like Yahoo! place strong emphasis on these basics whilst Google may favor factors outside our control such as link popularity. So how do we satisfy all search engines?

Notes are as follows:

1. Focus on the things that can be done at your end. This includes:
– Writing efficient code with as much scripting placed into external files.
– Select targeted keywords that do not have a large number or competing pages so that you have more chance to win position for them.
– Write keyword rich content.
– Have Title and Meta tags that are keyword rich and reflect what is written for a page.

2. Directory submissions are a key factor. Some may charge a price for inclusion whilst others may not. It is highly recommended that directory submissions are made simply because a human editor will look at your site, which in turn gives you more points with the search engines.

3. One of the most difficult points to fulfill is link building. If you have a site that offers useful information and services, in time it will generate the required links. There are other ways to speed the process such as writing articles and posting them on certain websites. However, the key factor to link building is not to obtain irrelevant links. This will simply be regarded as spamming and could result in negative consequences.

4. Lastly, the most important point, PATIENCE.

To recap, provided you follow the basic steps and have the patience, your site will climb up the ranks steadily. Link building will help improve your ranks but be careful because it can also harm your visibility if used in the wrong way i.e. obtaining too many links from non-related websites.