Search Engine Optimization Tips

Gone are the days when you could build a new website, upload it to your server and submit it to a few popular search engines. Getting listed well in search engines is not as easy as it used to be. Sure, there are those that will charge you a small fortune to get you listed top. Some use methods such as cloaking, buying high PR links and other measures that may get you short term results. But we won't focus on those. There are common sense things you can do for both on-page and off-page search engine optimization that can help you get a good start.

On-page Search Engine Optimization Tips

We'll start with what you can do for each of your pages to help what many call on-page optimization. These include your meta tags, such as the <title>, <description> and <keywords>. It also includes discussion on using <Hx> tags, constructing your paragraphs, using alt and title tags. Our goal is such, that you match your page filename to part of your page title, to the page description/abstract, to keywords, to hx tags, to anchor text to links to paragraph content and possibly to your page footer. By matching these together, your page will be fairly well optimized.

Naming your page - The filename.ext

How important is your filename? Let's say there is some small importance on it. When you search for a subject in search engines, some of them highlight a keyword in your filename or your directory path. This is just one small way to help with your on-page optimization. This also plays a role in your off-page optimization that we will discuss later.

Let's say you have a page about red widgets. Initially you might consider a page like rw.html to keep it short. Instead consider naming it to red-widgets.html. This puts your keywords directly in the filename.

Which file extension should you use? .html, .asp, .php, .cfm, shtml, etc. There are many file extensions for web pages depending on the server they are hosted on and whether or not one uses extended programming to generate pages beyond simple .html pages. Let's suppose though, that you are just starting your website and you are going to use an Apache server to host your files. Apache is very common web server and offers PHP and mySQL databases. So which file extension should you use? We suggest using .php as your extension on an Apache server, even if you do not plan to use any PHP code. Why you ask? As your site grows, so will the services you want to offer your customers. So will the pages of your site be indexed into search engines and if you are lucky, people will link to your pages.

At some point you decide to switch over and use PHP. But you have pages with the .html extension that rank well in google. If you had used the .php extension in the beginning, you would have no worries. Apache will render .php pages as html, even if there are no PHP commands in them. So by starting off your pages with a .php extension, even though they only contain html right now, you are planning for the future.

Page Title

Your page title is very important. It lets your visitors know what your page is about and lets search engines that index your page know what the page is about. There are many ways people word their page title. Some try to put every keyword imaginable in the title, some put the company or site name at the beginning, followed by a sentence, some with the sentence followed by the company or site name. Here are a few examples:

<title>XYZ Company - Red Widget Products for Engineers</title>

<title>Red Widgets for Engineers by XYZ Company</title>

<title>Red Widgets Red Widgets Red Widgets by XYZ Company</title>

We could go on listing ways to word your title. Some choose the first tile as it is a classic way to word your page title and communicates what your site is about. More recently, some are moving to the second title example. This puts your primary keywords you deem releveant for the page as the first words in the title. Some suggest this may help slightly with optimization. Obviously the third example illustrates how not to create a title tag. Work towards the long term, by creating good pages with relevent content.

So far, we have:
Filename: red-widgets.php
Page Title: <title>Red Widgets for Engineers by XYZ Company</title>

Meta Description

The meta description tag gives a brief description about the page. Some developers use it, some choose not to. Some search engines use it, and some may not. A page description is an important part of your page. For pages where you have little content, or by design, you choose to show a photo gallery or perhaps a flash animation, the page desciption meta tag can give search engines information to index the page with. Following is an example page description for our red-widgets.php page:

So far, we have:
Filename: red-widgets.php
Page Title: <title>Red Widgets for Engineers by XYZ Company</title>
Meta Description: <meta name="description" content="Information about Red Widgets from XYZ Company. Our Red Widgets help engineers solve problems.">

Meta Keywords

Some suggest that using keywords in a meta tag are dead. That most search engines do not rely on them anymore. Some suggest Google does not rely on them, which Yahoo and MSN may still rely upon them. Either way, it certainly will not hurt to construct a good meta keyword tag for your page(s).

The first example above should be considered to construct your meta keywords tag. Notice we use Red Widgets in the tag. We want our filename, page title, meta description and now meta keywords to mention our primary keyword. Often times, you may find it beneficial to construct your keywords after the page is constructed. This allows you to find a few other keywords from your content to add into the meta tag.

The second meta keyword is an example of spamming a keyword list. Multiple listings serve no purpose and some suggest it may even devalue your page in a search engine's listings. Increased use of the same keyword will serve no benefit. Select your keywords from the content of your page that have importance.

H Tags

H (header) tags are important to your page content and placing importance on header titles. The <h1> tag is typically used to enclose the title where your page content begins. By itself, the <h1> tag is quite large. However, you can use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to redefine how your <h1> tag displays. At the very beginning of this article, we use an <h1> tag round "Search Engine Optimization Tips" and have styled it to be medium blue in color with a font size of 16px. Additionally, we use <h2> and <h3> tags in this article. These are sub headings. Use <hx> tags accordingly, instead of simply bolding your headers. Some suggest a number of top search engines place value on the <hx> tags, particularly the <h1> tag.

<h1>Red Widgets for Engineers by XYZ Company</h1>

In this example, we take the same content used for the page title. It's relevent, short, and descriptive for a heading title.

So far, we have:
Filename: red-widgets.php
Page Title: <title>Red Widgets for Engineers by XYZ Company</title>
Meta Description: <meta name="description" content="Information about Red Widgets from XYZ Company. Our Red Widgets help engineers solve problems.">
Meta Keywords: <meta name="keywords" content="Red Widgets, Widgets, XYZ Company, Engineer, keyword 2, keyword 3, keyword 4">
<h1>: <h1>Red Widgets for Engineers by XYZ Company</h1>

Paragraph Tags

The <p> tag defines a paragraph. For example, in this article's source, you can see each paragraph is enclosed in <p>text</p> tags. When constructing your first paragraph, under your <h1> tag, try to incorporate your primary keyword phrase in your first sentence. For example:

<p>Red Widgets for Engineers by XYZ Company offer exceptional value and performance in the automotive field. Our Red Widgets are backed by a life time warranty and are rank top among Red Widgets according to a recent study.</p>

Incorporate your primary keyword/phrase such that it makes logical, common sense to the reader, reads well and describes your widget, without over doing it. You want to be descriptive, choosing to use your keyword or product name where it makes sense. Write as much information as you can about your product or page, providing your users with information to make informed purchasing decisions about your product and/or giving more content for search engines to index.

Alt Tags

Alt tags are used in images. Since an image has no way of telling a search engine, or someone who is blind, what the image is about, we can use the alt="" tag to briefly describe the image. In this case, we want to display an image of a red widget. So we name our .gif or .jpg file accordingly, red-widget.gif and construct an <img> tag to display it.

This gets our primary keyword/phrase in yet another html tag and does so gracefully. The alt description above accurately describes the image and will give search engines and those who are blind (and use technology to read the words aloud) to know what the image is about.

Anchor Text

Some suggest that anchor text plays an important role in search engine optimization and results. Using good anchor text make sense. What is anchor text? It is the text used for a link, and then the link is constructed around it. For example:

Link Popularity Checker

In this case, the anchor text is "Link Popularity Checker" and the link navigates to a page about checking for link popularity. This anchor text is important in describing the link so your users will know what they are navigating to.

In our case, suppose we have a power supply for our Red Widgets. We might put a link from our content about Red Widgets to:

Red Widget Power Supply

Anchor text is usually a good indicator of what a page is about and can be beneficial to use descriptive phrases or your keywords to link to other pages in your site.

On-page Search Engine Optimization Summary

By identify our primary keyword or keyprase, we can use it to construct our page with:

The filename of the page
The Page Title
The Description Meta Tag
The Keywords Meta Tag
The <h1> Tag
The first paragraph
Anchor Text
Images using alt text

By taking this approach, you spread out your keyword or keyphrase in all aspects of the page and there is no mistaking that the page is about red widgets. We take the opportunity to use our company name and even link to products with keyword anchor text that might compliment our red widgets.

If the market you are trying to reach initially is a local market to your city, you can improve your odds by incorporating your city name into your keyphrase. Often times it's much easier to rank for a keyphrase in a locality, where the online competition is narrowed down. For example, rather than trying for the far reaching keyphrase of "Web Design," you can work towards "MyCity Web Design." This puts your initial focus on your locality and it's much easier to rank for "MyCity Web Design" than it is for "Web Design." This allows you to focus your ranking on your locality where you have potential customers in your area looking for a web designer.