There are several components to optimizing a website for search engine ranking. Here’s the breakdown in a nutshell:
Page Title
Page title is the title tag on your page. It shows up on the title bar on top of your browser, and the heading of search engine results. Include your keywords, and the most important ones as close as possible to the beginning.
Description
Description also shows up on search engine results just below the heading. Google displays up to 160 characters, Yahoo! up to 165. Again, you want to include your keywords, but at the same time make sound enticing and relevant so the viewers will click on your link.
Keywords
Focus on 5 or 6 most important keywords. Being greedy with the keywords doesn’t necessarily improve your ranking, and having too many can have a negative effect.
Body Text
Body text is the main content in the body tag. This is important and you definitely want to include some of your keywords. There are different theories of a good density percentage, but the bottom line is you want a good content. If you find yourself worrying about keywords, or your text start sounding strange, it may be a sign you want to back off a bit.
H1 Heading
Headings are marked with H1 to H6 tags in html code. When the texts are marked with H1, they look more prominent to search engines and considered to be significant.
Bold Texts
Similar to H1 tags, search engines look at bold text as more important.
Anchor Texts
Anchor texts are the texts in the hyperlink, between the “a href” tag. To optimize the anchor texts, for example, instead of “yoursite.com”, make it “Website SEO Tips”.
Alt Texts
Alt texts are the image attributes in html code, and are not visible on the browser unless it doesn’t load the images for some reason. Search engines do not see images, so it is as if you are telling the machine what the images are.
These are the basic guidelines, but how do you know whether you are doing it properly? How do you know whether you are improving, or making it worse? It’s one way to experiment and do a lot of trial and error. Another way is to use a SEO program.
Website Auditor, a part of SEO PowerSuite package, analyzes everything mentioned above, reports your optimization rate, and recommends any modifications. I was able to bring my site to number two on Google search results using this program. Also included in SEO PowerSuite is Rank Tracker, SEO SpyGlass, and LinkAssistant, all of which are powerful tools.
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