Search Engine Optimisation Tips & Techniques to Increase your Website’s Search Engine Results Positions
If you’ve done your keyword research using one of the many tools freely available, such as Google KeywordTool as suggested in my last post. Analyse your competition to see what they are ranking for and gauge their success. Have a look into their link profile and develop your own link building strategy. On page SEO is just one aspect of the bigger picture, albeit a very important one, and as such you should spend time on this.
Having your keywords finalised for each page is a step in the right direction. I would recommend that you focus on three keywords, at the most, per page normally. A point to remember is that you don’t have to try and fit all your keywords to just the homepage, simply use another page of your website.
As an example, I could use the following root of the domain -
www.mysuperseowebsite.co.uk, to target the keywords; internet marketing and internet marketing services. Then I can use:
www.mysuperseowebsite.co.uk/small-business-seo, to target different a different keyword like small business SEO.
Once you have decided on which page to use for your chosen keywords, I would page attention to the important on page factors as follows:
1.) Title Tags
The title tag of each page is one of the most important factors for on page optimisation and overall in search engine optimisation. This tag is used to explain to the search engine bots what the page is about and this is what is shown in bold or blue text after you search for something, therefore it is essential to place your keyword in the title tag, not just for the search engines, but for your customers, so that they know what is on your website page. The key to writing a search engine friendly title that is effective in targeting your keywords is to make the title look natural whilst still including the target keywords and to limit the character length (including spaces) to between 60 and 65.
2.) Meta Description
This is another important part of on page optimisation. The meta description is shown under the title in the search engine results and typically Google will display around 150-160 characters here. Spend time on these, make sure that each meta description is unique and include your keywords here whilst not making it look or read unnaturally. Think of the meta description as a brief sales pitch to your potential customers.
3.) Content
The first part to look at is the page heading which should normally be in h1 tags. Also, try and include the page keywords with this tag as it is good from an SEO point as the search engines give this weight over other on page factors. For subtitles and other important headings use h2 and h3 tags as these carry less weight, but will still be picked up by the search engines. Note well though not to spam the page with keywords, don’t force a keyword into all h2 and h3 tags, only if it reads and makes sense to do so. Next, the content on the page should be relevant to the keywords for the page, it’s quite straightforward. Another tip to use is to bold, italicise or underline your keywords within the content on the page, again don’t over use these.
4.) Alt Tags
Alt tags can be found when you hover over an image, usually some text will appear, this is the ‘alternate tag’. These can also be a good method of adding either keywords or related content to the keywords to describe the image.
5.) Video
Placing a video on your website can be a good way to keep visitors on your site for a longer period of time. And if you upload the video via YouTube, you can create a nice link back to your site from an authoritative site, ideal for SEO.
6.) Contextual Links
In effect, internal links using keyword anchor text. For example, if you create a page within your website that targets ‘small business SEO’, you can link from another page that mentions the this keywords or similar, thus creating a contextual anchor link.
7.) Keyword Domains
Domains that contain keywords are ideal for increasing search engine results positions, but these aren’t always available or appropriate. But, the next best thing is to create keyword rich sub URL’s. An example would be as before, if the keyword is small business seo, the best URL would be something like www.mysuperseowebsite.co.uk/small-business-seo.
You should now have a reasonable understanding of on page optimisation. If your current site lacks the above, make the changes and then allow the search engines to cache (re-index) the page and see what happens to the search engine results position for your chosen keywords. If you don’t know how to carry these techniques out or just don’t have the time, get in touch today!
