SEO In a Nutshell: On Page Elements

SEO In a Nutshell: On Page Elements

Search engine optimization isn't nearly as easy as some people might purport but neither is it quite as mystifying as you may have been led to believe. As part of your internet marketing strategy, however, you can't simply forget about SEO and its benefits to your online business. Here are a few simple things you can change on your website to better optimize it for the big three search engines of Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Meta Tags

You probably already know the importance of keywords and hopefully you're already using them throughout your website. But there's another place you should add your keywords and that's in meta tags.

Just so we're clear about what a meta tag, here's a definition: A special tag that supplies information about a website page and its online elements. For SEO purposes, meta tags include keywords that correspond to the content on the page. Most search engines use this data to index websites. Meta tags are located in the source code of your website's pages; in other words they're a "behind-the-scenes" type of element.

You can add meta tags to the information at the very top of your pages (in the area not visible to visitors that only search engines will access), to any images used on your website and/or blog, and to video and audio content. The more times you use the most valuable keywords for your website, the more likely it is to get indexed for those keywords by search engines, so go ahead and use them in the file names of this type of content, too.

Textual Content

All of the written content on your pages should also include these keywords. If you're writing a blog post or an article that will be featured on your website, shoot for a keyword density of two to five percent. That means if you are writing a text piece of 500 words (which is the ideal number of words for both search engines and human visitors, by the way), that means you should use your target keyword phrase about three times.

Be careful that you don't just "stuff" keywords into your content willy nilly, however. Not only does it read unnaturally, it could be construed as spam by the very search engines you want to rank your site highly!

Many businesses also adopt an internet marketing strategy whereby they post content around the Internet, usually at article directory sites or other people's blogs, that contain the keywords they want to optimize. As long as you choose high ranking sites to post your articles, this certainly doesn't hurt SEO.

Website Elements

Take a look at your page's titles. Do they incorporate your keywords? Not only should the keywords be part of page titles, they should be included in the headlines on those pages, as well. Some SEO specialists think that the larger font size (H1) used in headlines carries more weight with search engines. One last piece of advice is to ensure that those pages using keywords in the title be no further than one click away from the home page.

Another good way to optimize your site is to use outbound links with anchor text. Anchor text refers to appropriate keyword phrases that are linked to pages outside of your website.

Yet one more tip is that it is assumed search engine spiders crawl your site from top to bottom, so the most important information containing keywords should be located toward the top of the page. The navigation bar that is usually placed below the header is there for a reason so don't get creative and move it further down the page or off to the side.

With a few simple changes, your internet marketing strategy can get a real boost from SEO. Try incorporating these tips in your website's design and see if it makes a difference in your traffic and conversion rates.