Search Engine Optimisation (Part 2)

How do you optimise your website?

In this article I am looking specifically at on-page optimisation, how your page content is organised. The next and final article in this series will discuss off-page/site external factors for website search engine optimisation.

Domain Name

This maybe like closing the gate after the horse has bolted, but the name you choose for your website is very important. Search engines will look for keywords in your domain name so naturally www.cats.com should be about cats. If your domain name is www.shropshire-felines.com it doesn’t quite have the same impact and search engines are smart enough to recognise that the generic term ‘cats’ is likely to be more to do with cats than a lesser name. Lots of other factors could help the shropshire-felines.com site rank higher for many reasons. It just has to work so much harder because it’s name is a little off-beat. (At the time of writing this article shropshire-felines.com does not exist, I have used this name as an example).

Page Title

The page title you use is also very important. You will find the title of a web page in the top left corner of your browser window. Your page title should be simple and unique to the specific page on your website. It should describe your page content and therefore contain your main page keyword(s) and/or key phrase. Keep your keywords to the start of the title and particularly for Google keep the title to approximately 65 characters in length including spaces. Other search engines will accept longer titles, Google will cut the title short.

Meta Page Description

You don’t see this one on your site it is part of the underlying code, but don’t underestimate the importance of the page description. For example when you perform a search using a search engine, the returned list of web pages have a page title, a page description and a web page link. The meta page description you provide for your page describes the content of your page to the search engine and more importantly to the human searcher. The page description should include your keyword phrases in a simple and unique description of your page content.

Meta Keywords

They have very little influence in today’s search engine rankings. In the 90’s they did, but as search engines have evolved the list of keywords are given a back seat in preference to the relationship between your page title, description and content. But they are good at keeping you focussed on what your article or page is supposed to be about. As you have worked hard to get the right keyword(s) and keyword phrases, then optimised your page using those keywords, it makes sense to add them to the keyword meta tag for the search engines that do put some relevance to the meta keyword tag.

And now moving onto the actual page content….

Content Headings

Your web pages have a range of html coded headings heading1 to heading6 or H1-H6. Heading1 (H1) being the largest text heading down to H6 being the smallest text heading. Your H1 heading should be at the top or start of your web page and should contain your main keyword(s) or key phrase. It is best not to just repeat your page title in your main H1 heading, but to use a variation on the wording as repeating the same phrase over may appear to be spam content to search engines. Why H1? Search engines look at the top level H1 headings and place a high level of importance on the H1 text. This importance rating reduces from H1 down to H6. The search engine views the page just as you would see a web page with large headings for main content and smaller headings for less important, sub-content.

Page Content

By now you should be on the same track. Your page title, page description, page keywords and your H1 content heading should relate simply and uniquely to the page content you are are writing. Your keywords and phrases should appear early in your content, repeated a few times in the natural flow of your sentences. Remember “Content is King” so if your content is good quality, relevant and unique then you have the edge over potential competitors on the web.

Basic Page Content Tips

• Ensure that your web pages are coded with valid HTML and CSS
• Provide useful descriptions of your images for your graphics ALT tags
• Provide links in your content flow to important internal pages from your home page and between related internal pages
• Provide external links to relevant websites from your related pages
• For content management systems use search engine friendly URLs

Also take a look at an article called Search Engine Optimisation Quick Guide. This provides a practical example of how to optimise your individual pages.

Conclusion

This article has covered a few ways to optimise your individual pages for search engines. It’s all very standard practice in web design, it is time consuming and at the time quite thankless because a good part of the effort involved isn’t viewable on the page you are producing.

It is important to remember that search engines are not humans, they do not read your text and mark your page out of ten based on how interesting or pretty your page is. The search engines trawl through your web page code and rate your page against numerous on-page and off-page factors. We have just covered a few of the on-page factors.

This article is also available on Limousin Life Magazine