Article by Tim D Jones
Making simple changes to a website to improve search
engine rankings and drive traffic is not as complicated as it sounds. This
article details the factors that can be simply manipulated yet produce big
improvements if implemented correctly. They are worth bookmarking or printing
so they can be used in the future as a checklist when creating new pages or
reviewing your website.
1) Keyphrase Research - Before you can begin implementing any of the
optimization techniques mentioned in the rest of this article, you will need
to know which keyphrases you are going to optimize your site for. Once this is
decided, everything becomes a lot clearer.
You should be able to get a rough idea of target keyphrases from the content
on the pages within your site. At the end of the day, if there's not any
content at which to target optimisation, achieving good search engine rankings
will be very difficult and ultimately pointless! Visitors will leave
immediately if they are not provided with the content they are searching for.
A frequent mistake is to target the keyphrases that drive the largest search
volumes. It's important to target keyphrases that directly relate to your
websites content, and the more defined the keyphrases are the better. Using
keyphrases that may drive 120 high convertible visitors to your site each
month is likely to be much better than targeting a highly competitive broad
keyphrase that is only vaguely related to your business, even if it does
attract 30,000 searches each month.
2) Page Titles - This is one of the key on-page elements that can be
optimized. Each title should be different, and full of keyphrases related to
the content of its page. Search engines often only display the first 65 or so
characters of the page title, so it's important to get the most important
keyphrases at the beginning of the page title. Also, the characters near the
front of the page title are given more significance in algorithms.
The page title is displayed in the search engine results, so must make sense
and encourage browsers to action the link. Finding a balance between
readability and keyphrases density is a challenge but something that will
improve with time and practise.
3) Meta Description - The meta description is not actually included in search
engine algorithms, although as it is displayed in search engine results pages,
it is vital it is optimised. Like page titles, the meta description should be
specific to every page and contain text that is relevant to the key phrases
that page is aimed at.The meta description is limited to around 160 characters, so it can often be
challenging to fit all the required info into such a small space. However, if
no meta description is entered, search engines tend to grab a random chunk of
text from the page, regardless if it makes sense or is useful to the searcher.
You can avoid this from happening, by ensuring every page has a meta
description of some variety.
4) Page Content - Page content is viewed as the best method of attracting
visitors and incoming links to a website, so it's important that it is given
sufficient time and resource. Search engines thrive on content, so the more
content on your site the better for search engine rankings. Content is less
important now in search engine algorithms than it has been however, I suggest
ensuring every keyphrase that is being targeted is mentioned about every 100
words or so. Beware - don't fall into the trap of keyphrase stuffing! Search
engines employ advanced techniques to track this and will more than likely
pick up on it immediately and you could end up with a blacklisted site that is
impossible to rank.
Source: SEOARTICLES4U.com