Search Engine Optimization

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Search engine optimization involves a number of on-page and off-page factors. The off-page optimizations are generally the most important factors, but it is still important to use on-page optimizations.

Optimizing Your Website (on-page factors)

Did You Know?

A Google Page Rank (PR) is a specific rating used to determine how popular a website is. The rating is based on a number of factors, but is most commonly associated with the number of links pointing to a website. Generally, the more links there are pointing to a particular website, the higher PR it will have. It is important to note that PR is not the only metric Google uses when determining the ranking of websites for particular keywords.

To view the PR of websites, you need to have the Google Toolbar installed on your web browser.

There are a number of on-page factors you need to consider when optimizing your web pages for the search engines. On-page factors simply refer to how keywords and other elements are used on your web pages to get higher search engine rankings.

Each search engine gives a different amount of importance to on-page factors. Yahoo and MSN give more weight to on-page optimizations than Google, which tends to favor the number, and type, of incoming links a lot more.

Ensure that each page on your website has its own topic that it can focus on based on a particular keyword phrase. Once you've chosen the main topic for a particular page, you can optimize several different aspects of the page based around several keywords related to that topic. It's important to only optimize your page for a small set of around three or four keywords. Any more than that, and your content will begin to appear too artificial and will not sound natural.

Tags

Include the main keywords in the title tag of the page and separate each keyword, or keyword phrase, using the '|' character instead of commas or the word 'and'.

You will end up with a title tag that looks something like,

<title>Keyword1 | Keyword2 | Keyword3</title>

You should also try to include one or two of your keywords at least once in either an H1 or H2 header tag; and these tags should be as close to the beginning of your page as possible.

You can use various font styles such as bold, underline, and italics to highlight your keywords in the content of the page. However, use these very sparingly (once per keyword) because the search engines will penalize your site if the keywords are emphasized too often, which will hurt your rankings.

If you have any images on your webpage, you can include your main keywords in the alt attribute of the <image> tag. This text will appear if the image does not load into the person's web browser for some reason. The search engines will always read the alt text, regardless of whether the image is shown or not. Be very careful not to overdo this - do not repeat your keywords a bunch of times because the search engines will consider this to be keyword stuffing and will penalize your website (if they don't ban it entirely).

In Part 2, we'll look at how you can optimize the content of your website to improve your search engine rankings.

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