Heaven Is Page Optimisation
Hi Everyone,
Hands up those of you that find the whole concept of keywords and page optimisation confusing!! Keyword optimisation is a well-known method for helping people find your content either by search engines or searching within a website. So why is it so difficult?
Hopefully this simple guide that I use will help you understand the why's and how's
Optimising Keywords and Where to Place Them.
You need to locate your core keyword in a number of different places on a page. With the exclusion of your homepage and landing page where you may be required to optimise for a number of keywords related to either a product or service, usually you only want to optimise a page for a single keyword or keyword phrase.
Once you have selected your keyword and there are a lot of tools to help you with this task you then need to place it:
Title Tag of each Page - placing your keyword or keyword phrase in the title tag of each page is one of the very first things you need to do.
Examples of an optimized title for a homepage:
Antiques, Art, Baby, Books | eBay
Suits, Shirts, Ties, Shoes | Austinreed
Cloths shop for women, men, baby, kids | Zara
Examples of an optimized title for a subpage:
Art |eBay
Men's suits | Austinreed
Kids: trousers, tops, dresses | Zara
Title tags that have been optimised have special features:
Do not use duplicate title tags. Each page should display a unique title so that your pages are not trying to compete for rankings.
The titles should not be more than 70 characters
Add your company name to the end of your title tag, this helps with building brand awareness.
Consider what language would be most convincing and balance that with the keyword usage.
Tag Description for Each Page
The next location you need to put the keyword or keyword phrase is in the tag description of each page. This is a short explanation that shows up in the search engine results, or when you share pages on Facebook or LinkedIn. Although the description should be written for humans and not solely for search engines, you ought to take in to account your keyword or phrase and add it at least once.
When writing the description use compelling plain English that will make the customer want to click on the link. Page description that are optimised should be up to 150 characters or if possible less. The longer the description, Google will then have to truncate it with ellipses ().
The Main Form of the Content
The acknowledged standard for the number of times a keyword or phrase should appear in an article is about 3% but as a good guide include your keyword about 2-3 times. Include the keyword in the first paragraph as the search engines will look at the page in descending order. So the first paragraph will be the first thing it will see. Also as a rule of thumb article should be a minimum of 300 words for the purposes of SEO.
Article Headings
Article headings are regularly labelled as Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, etc. or they can be in this format H1, H2, H3, etc. The heading need to be written in a way to include the core keywords and to sum-up what is to follow. This supports both people and spiders to quickly scan the page to see what might be most appropriate to them.
Page URL
A further location that you should put your core keyword is within the URL of the page. See example below
permalink - yoursite.com/core-keyword-goes-here/
permalink - yoursite.com/video-marketing/
As you can see above, we have optimised the page URL for the term "video marketing". It may not be realistic to include your keyword in the page URL of each page, this is not an issue. The page URL should be brief, descriptive and user friendly, to aid the reader and spiders and should correctly depict what is on the page. If at all possible try and avoid the use of special characters, such a quotes or ampersands, which can break up the URLs and try to configure your CMS (content management system) so that you can manually edit the URLs.
Image ALT Tags
Search engines are not able to understand a photo or multimedia content, so for SEO best practice we need to consider the image ALT tags. When writing the ALT tag for an image you need to describe the content for people and also spiders and when appropriate try to include the core keywords.
Another SEO best practice is to place the keyword phrase as near to the beginning of the ALT tag as possible. In the same way videos should also be identified with the appropriate Meta information is clearly written title and description, so that the search engines will understand what the content is.
Putting it All in to Practice
My hope is that this article has in some way clarified how to do page level keyword optimisation. There are a number of benefits to be gained from following SEO best practices: increased traffic to site, content is more easily found.
I'm sure there are many tips that you could add about page optimisation, so how about adding some here! Please, feel free to leave a comment below with your number one tip that you would give to a newbie who is trying to do page optimisation.
Hands up those of you that find the whole concept of keywords and page optimisation confusing!! Keyword optimisation is a well-known method for helping people find your content either by search engines or searching within a website. So why is it so difficult?
Hopefully this simple guide that I use will help you understand the why's and how's
Optimising Keywords and Where to Place Them.
You need to locate your core keyword in a number of different places on a page. With the exclusion of your homepage and landing page where you may be required to optimise for a number of keywords related to either a product or service, usually you only want to optimise a page for a single keyword or keyword phrase.
Once you have selected your keyword and there are a lot of tools to help you with this task you then need to place it:
Title Tag of each Page - placing your keyword or keyword phrase in the title tag of each page is one of the very first things you need to do.
Examples of an optimized title for a homepage:
Antiques, Art, Baby, Books | eBay
Suits, Shirts, Ties, Shoes | Austinreed
Cloths shop for women, men, baby, kids | Zara
Examples of an optimized title for a subpage:
Art |eBay
Men's suits | Austinreed
Kids: trousers, tops, dresses | Zara
Title tags that have been optimised have special features:
Do not use duplicate title tags. Each page should display a unique title so that your pages are not trying to compete for rankings.
The titles should not be more than 70 characters
Add your company name to the end of your title tag, this helps with building brand awareness.
Consider what language would be most convincing and balance that with the keyword usage.
Tag Description for Each Page
The next location you need to put the keyword or keyword phrase is in the tag description of each page. This is a short explanation that shows up in the search engine results, or when you share pages on Facebook or LinkedIn. Although the description should be written for humans and not solely for search engines, you ought to take in to account your keyword or phrase and add it at least once.
When writing the description use compelling plain English that will make the customer want to click on the link. Page description that are optimised should be up to 150 characters or if possible less. The longer the description, Google will then have to truncate it with ellipses ().
The Main Form of the Content
The acknowledged standard for the number of times a keyword or phrase should appear in an article is about 3% but as a good guide include your keyword about 2-3 times. Include the keyword in the first paragraph as the search engines will look at the page in descending order. So the first paragraph will be the first thing it will see. Also as a rule of thumb article should be a minimum of 300 words for the purposes of SEO.
Article Headings
Article headings are regularly labelled as Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, etc. or they can be in this format H1, H2, H3, etc. The heading need to be written in a way to include the core keywords and to sum-up what is to follow. This supports both people and spiders to quickly scan the page to see what might be most appropriate to them.
Page URL
A further location that you should put your core keyword is within the URL of the page. See example below
permalink - yoursite.com/core-keyword-goes-here/
permalink - yoursite.com/video-marketing/
As you can see above, we have optimised the page URL for the term "video marketing". It may not be realistic to include your keyword in the page URL of each page, this is not an issue. The page URL should be brief, descriptive and user friendly, to aid the reader and spiders and should correctly depict what is on the page. If at all possible try and avoid the use of special characters, such a quotes or ampersands, which can break up the URLs and try to configure your CMS (content management system) so that you can manually edit the URLs.
Image ALT Tags
Search engines are not able to understand a photo or multimedia content, so for SEO best practice we need to consider the image ALT tags. When writing the ALT tag for an image you need to describe the content for people and also spiders and when appropriate try to include the core keywords.
Another SEO best practice is to place the keyword phrase as near to the beginning of the ALT tag as possible. In the same way videos should also be identified with the appropriate Meta information is clearly written title and description, so that the search engines will understand what the content is.
Putting it All in to Practice
My hope is that this article has in some way clarified how to do page level keyword optimisation. There are a number of benefits to be gained from following SEO best practices: increased traffic to site, content is more easily found.
I'm sure there are many tips that you could add about page optimisation, so how about adding some here! Please, feel free to leave a comment below with your number one tip that you would give to a newbie who is trying to do page optimisation.
