SEO
 Home | Free Articles About SEO | Links | | Contact
SEO articles
Search Engine Optimization, Or SEO, Is Defined As Any Practice Or Technique Whose End Goal Is To Improve Your Website's Ranking In The Search Engines. In Fact, 80 Percent Of Online Traffic Comes From Search Engines, So You Can See Why Learning SEO Is Very Important. Welcome To SEO.Valuearticles.Com. As You Explore This Site, You'll Discover...
How To Boost Traffic To Your Site In A Weekend
3 Blazing Hot SEO Traffic Generators
6 Powerful Truths About SEO That You Don't Know
Free Online SEO Tools You Can't Go Without

Remember... If You Are Looking For Quality Information Related To SEO, Add This Site To Your Favorites Right Now, As We Update It Daily With The Latest News And Information Related To SEO And Similar Topics. Enjoy The Site.

Everything You Must Know About Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO Services, SEO Optimization, SEO Company, And Search Engine Optimization Services.

Latest Related Articles About SEO
10 Easier Ways Than SEO To Get Web Site Traffic
Everyone wants "organic" or "free" traffic, but it’s a full time job to try to keep on top of the search engines changing rules. Instead, if you...
Continue Reading

Is Overnight SEO Success Still Possible?
As the owner of a search engine optimization company, I have seen the SEO industry evolve a great deal over the years but never more dramatically...
Continue Reading

Are your SEO efforts going to waste?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a long and complicated process that can be highly rewarding if done correctly. SEO is not a waste of time, but...
Continue Reading

Looking For More Articles Related To SEO?



Brad Callen - SEO Elite
SEO
Search Engine Optimization Made Easy With Seo Elite.

Paul Smithson - XSitePro
SEO
XSitePro - The Tool For Creating Optimized Websites!

Aaron Wall - SEOBook
SEO
SEOBook - The Only Current SEO Book On The Planet

Search Engine Optimization
Poll

 
Partner Links
Basic SEO Article - Focusing on Quick Optimization techniques for the newbie
Author: Brad Callen

Basic On-Page SEO

On-page optimization is often ignored by the top sites on Google - after all, who cares about a few percentage points when you can literally buy your way to the top of the search engine result pages (SERPs) with a bucket-load of inbound links?

Today I’ll discuss a bit about why, contrary to common practice, why on-page SEO is so important and then tell you how you can quickly optimize your web pages even if you have very little time!

On-Page SEO - The Benefits

A lot of webmasters (including some self-proclaimed SEO experts) claim that on-page optimization is obsolete - that the only thing that matters is off-page optimization (i.e. link building).

So is that true?

Actually, like most SEO hype, there’s some truth involved. Inbound links have become the overwhelming determining factor in a website’s search engine rankings, but theres more to the story then that.

Why bother with On-Page SEO?

Here are just three reasons off the top of my head:

• With everyone chasing after links, the playing field is leveled somewhat. This means that well-optimized pages will have a better chance of ranking higher if they might not beat the top websites on link count (but come close nevertheless).

• Because of keyword spamming, search engines paid more attention to links. Now, because of link-spamming, search engines are moving back towards paying more attention to other ranking factors, including on-page optimization.

• Over 90% of your competition probably doesn’t know how to optimize their web pages, or are doing it wrong, or are probably committing some sort of search engine spamming, so that you can immediately place yourself within the top 10% of your niche by just spending a few minutes on each page and getting things done right (or hiring someone to do it for you if you have a huge site).

I’ll be honest. No one knows exactly how important on-page optimization is. Of course, you should still be paying a great deal of attention to link-building, but the key is this – link-building is a long-term process, whereas on-page optimization a short, one-time thing. With its obvious ranking benefits, why wouldn’t you be optimizing your web pages?

On-Page SEO – A Quick Tour

Before I go over the techniques, I want you to remember these things:

Search engine optimization is a lot about doing things in moderation – you can’t do too little of it otherwise your pages won’t rank at all, and if you go too far (and start spamming the search engines), you’ll get your website banned and essentially kiss your online business goodbye.

Secondly, before you are optimizing a particular page, make sure you write down a short list of core keywords for that page. This is extremely important – search engines rank pages, not websites, so all your efforts should be directed towards making sure individual pages rank best for their own primary keyword.

Title Tag

The Title tag is where most webmasters make serious mistakes (in case you didn’t know, the Title tag contains the text that you see on the top of your browser window). Now the best way to write a Title tag is to make sure that you get your best keywords for that page in there. Don’t bother with words that are not needed, such as “and” or “the” – stick with your core keywords.

Using the example of a website owned by a professional resume writer looking to start their online business, for the home page you would probably use the following Title tag:

“Professional Resume Writer | Guaranteed Resume Writing”

Not only do you have your core keywords in there, you have also managed to combine them in one line without using the needless words like “and” and “the”.

Of course, you can always go too far and stuff the Title tag with as many keywords as possible. If you are thinking about doing that, DON’T! That sort of optimization will land you into trouble with the search engine algorithms, which automatically flag any website that uses spammy optimization techniques – and once you are “red-flagged” like this, you’ll be going down, not up in the rankings.

The next step is to take care of all your header tags.

Header Tags

Also known as H1 and H2 (and so on) tags, the header tags in your page give the search engine spiders an idea of how your page is structured. Therefore, if you can put in important keywords that are relevant to your page’s content in the header tags, the search engine will then “know” that this particular page contains information on topics relating to those keywords – thus helping your page rank better for those keywords.

It’s actually simpler than it sounds. Sticking with the “Resume Writer” website, let’s suppose you have a page that’s titled “How to write a Resume” (bear with me here). Now, you might have two sections on that page – an article on resume writing and general resume writing tips. Now instead of lumping it all together, here’s what you could do:

• H1 tag for the page heading – including a variation of the Title tag
• H2 tags for both sections – “Resume Writing” and “Resume Writing Tips” in this case.

Textual Tags

When a search engine spider is scanning a page, it’s looking for several factors to determine what is important and what’s not. In particular, it looks for text tags – bold, underline or italics, to help it rank the page. Why?

Quite simply, the search engine spider is programmed to “think” that any text that is put in bold, italics or underlined is considered important information by the user, and therefore it “might” be important. This is where bullet points come in handy as well.

I said “might” be important because search engine spiders have very sophisticated algorithms that look at hundreds of other factors, including the relevance of the surrounding text.

So if you concentrate on putting bold or italics tags around your core keywords (while maintaining a natural flow of content), you will be directly improving the chances of a search engine spider ranking that page higher for those keywords.

Similarly, if you have an important list of points that you want to emphasize (or perhaps summarize), you could put them in an ordered (numbered) list or just a plain bulleted list on your page – this will set that portion of text apart and alert the search engine spider that this text is more important.

The Image Tag

This is an interesting tag because it’s not that widely-used, and when some webmasters do use it they tend to stuff the tag with keywords in a futile attempt to influence search engines.

The Image tag is supposed to help the search engines “read” into what the image that you are displaying is about – thus the need to plug in your relevant keywords into the tag. Note that if your image is, let’s say, a picture of a hiking resort and your website is an adventure tours business, then you might plug in keywords that relate to hiking resorts – remember to focus on the core keywords for that page and not just the website on the whole.

About the Author

About the author:
Brad Callen
SEO Professional, owner of http://www.seoelite.com and Internet Marketing Consultant for http://www.Textlinkbrokers.com . Any reproduction of this article needs to have an html link pointing to http://www.textlinkbrokers.com


Article Keywords:
SEO


Google





A Quick Note From The Publisher...

If you like the article above, you may be interested in the following article which is also related to SEO...

12 Things You Really Should Know About SEO
From the very beginning of the Internet, the number one challenge which all of us have faced is how to attract qualified visitors to our websites. Throughout the boom years, one of the most popular solutions was to get massive funding, relatively easy to get in those days, and "buy" traffic, by various means. As an iconoclastic young developer, with ambitions of beating the "big boys" at their own game, more time than money or the connections to get it, I sought a less capital intensive methodology to achieve the same results. Years of study and rapt attention to the pertinent forums, trying everything that even seemed to make sense (making many mistakes along the way, and learning much from each one), then carefully monitoring the results, has lead to many highly workable tools in our SEO bag of tricks. The outcome of these trial and error methods, (lots of both) lays the foundation of our SEO services and the basis for the ongoing growth of traffic to your website and ours. ...
Continue Reading

 

SEO,

SEO
News

SEO

What You Need to Know about SEO
I recently asked a few start-ups why they avoid thinking about SEO. The most common reason I heard was some variant on the theme “SEO seems like this big huge thing that requires a lot of knowledge.”

SEO Services Alert: Internet Marketing Blueprint Unveiled at 2012 AAJ Winter Convention
PHOENIX, Feb. 10, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- When you design your house you need an architect; when you design your lawyer Internet marketing campaign, you need an SEO architect who understands the online legal ...

5 Must-Have SEO Skills
On-page optimization is just the beginning. In addition to having a deep understanding of web analytics and metrics, modern day SEOs need to be skilled in technical SEO, social media marketing, link building, usability, and content marketing.

The Golden Age Of SEO
I’m a fan of SEO. Search engine optimization. Ah, yes. Just writing it makes me happy. It’s what I do. It’s my calling. I can’t think of anything in the past decade that has kept me more enthralled and engaged… besides my wife of course.

seo.valuearticles.com - All Rights Reserved. Legal Information
Featuring Information About Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO Services, SEO Optimization, SEO Company, And Search Engine Optimization Services.