A basic guide to Search Engine Optimisation within web pages

"Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the most important ingredients for getting large amounts of traffic to your website besides high-quality content. At its most basic, SEO means finding ways to increase your site's appearance in web visitors' search results. This generally means more traffic to your site."

A few days ago I held an internal talk on some basic SEO methods for our content editors. I explained while intense SEO can involve complex site restructuring with a firm (or consultant) that specialises in this area, there are a few simple steps editors can take to increase their organic search engine ranking.

Keywords

• Included in your copy as an exact match.
• Repeated naturally throughout the copy on the site.
• Included in the headings, sub-headings, first paragraph even better in the first sentence.
• If at all possible in a list.

META tags

• The page title is the blue underlined writing you see on your search results such as Google, although the characters are limited on Google to 69 characters, it’s a prime location for keywords.
• The description needs to be a short yet comprehensive summary including your keywords, you need to clever about this as it needs to grab the attention of anyone reading it to ensure they click through to your site.
• Keyword tag has no limit on length and should include all the keywords you are choosing to optimise on that page. Not all search engines will uses this information due to spamming and abuse by web-masters.
• Remember to make every page unique!

Title tag

• Title tags, technically called title elements, define the title of a document and are required for all HTML/XHTML documents.
• A title tag is the main text that describes an online document. It is the single most important on-page SEO element (behind overall content) and appears in three key places:

                          Browser Bar
                          Search engine results page
                          External Websites (social networks etc.)

• Best Practices, Less than 70 characters, as this is the limit Google displays in search results.

ALT tags

• An ALT attribute quite simply is an alternative description for an image, if the images are appropriate to the site they should be appropriate for you to add a keyword-rich description but don’t abuse them!

H1 tag

• It's the first heading on each of your web pages. Google places high importance on the first major heading on a page – the logic being that Google expects it to contain some prime keywords. So, your webmaster should help Google by loading some prime keywords into the H1 tag, whilst keeping it meaningful and attractive for the human visitor.

A tags

• An essential component of the web is hypertext or hyperlinking - linking from one piece of content to another. The basic HTML element for creating a link is the anchor tag. The HTML format for the anchor tag is <a href="url">Link Text</a>. Both the destination URL and some link element are required.
• You can improve SEO by using relevant, accurate keywords as the anchor text. Using descriptive keywords as the anchor text describes the destination content for end users and for search engines. Having someone refer to your site content with a "click here" link does little to improve your SEO. If the other text around the anchor text is also related the relevancy of the link increases.

Domain name and keyword-rich page names

• Having a keyword-rich domain and pages throughout the site that are appropriately named with keywords.
• While keywords alone won’t get you the number one spot in the search engines, they are one of the vital elements that contribute to a successful SEO campaign. As with the Dewey Decimal System, consisting of numbers, index cards filled alphabetically complete with keywords, author and the title of the book, giving the user three possibilities to find the same outcome. Keywords, a professionally-built search-engine-friendly site and industry-specific backlinks will all do the same to support your SEO and help your listings in the search engines.

Keyword Density

• The keyword density tool is useful for helping webmasters and SEOs achieve their optimum keyword density for a set of key terms.
• Keyword density is important because search engines use this information to categorise a site's theme, and to determine which terms the site is relevant to. The perfect keyword density will help achieve higher search engine positions. Keyword density needs to be balanced correctly (too low and you will not get the optimum benefit, too high and your page might get flagged for “keyword spamming”).

Friendly URLs

• Google bolds keywords searched for in URLs in its results. So using keyword rich URLs will encourage users to click your page - because the words they searched for will stand out in bold in the URL in the results. This is also a reason to have short URLs - Google will truncate them if they are too long.
• Google takes a lot of account of the terms used to link to a page (so if you link to this page, don't say 'read this page' - use 'SEO friendly URLs' as your link text ...). If keywords are in your URL, and people use the full URL as the link text, you'll get benefit from the keywords in the URL. Of course, most people don't link like this, and some forum software truncates URLs.
• SEO friendly URLs will help users understand what the page is about. So if it looks relevant, they are more likely to click it.

First Paragraph

• The first paragraph of this post might sound a little bit redundant since the title is already clear on the fact that the first paragraph of a post is important but it immediately illustrates the point of this post.
• Often many people make the mistake of writing a (long) non relevant introduction before coming to the point of a post. Though in the writer's mind it makes sense it doesn’t in the “mind” of Google and in fact it’s also not favoured by readers. Especially on the web people are looking for quick confirmation they’ve found the right content, if the first paragraph doesn’t confirm this changes are they leave your page or site.

Usability

• Clear - Is the page easy to look at and find the relevant information? An Easy Readable Format.
• Concise - Less of the flannel: focused and relevant content.
• Consistent - Does the page layout and content match the rest of the site?