Basic On Page SEO: Step by Step Instruction

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By cshenterprise


These Simple Steps Will Bring Targeted Visitors to Your Website

(By now, I hope you have selected the right keyword for your site. This is the most important part of SEO.)

OK, without further ado, step by step on basic on-page Search Engine Optimization.

TAKE FULL ADVANTAGE OF HTML

There are some simple techniques that can make all the difference with these search engines as it's all about making your site as friendly as possible for them, and making it easy for their 'robots' (spiders) to automatically extract your headings, links, key words, and text.

These tips will simply help you please the search engines AND your visitors, by including all the right information in the right places:

1. Use H1 heading tags all over... The HTML language has 'header tags': <H1>, <H2>, and so on down to <H7>. They're meant to be automatically formatted headings to head up pages and break up long bodies of text.

The <H1> tag is meant to be the page title, and then you use H2 onward for progressively smaller (and less important) headings throughout the page. Sadly, most browsers make H1 headings far too big (around 30pt text!) so nobody uses them, usually settling for H4 instead (which comes out around 14pt instead) because it looks nicer on the page. Of course the search engines would pay MUCH more attention to H1 tags, so the rule is this:

Wherever you're going to use a heading tag numbered 2 or more, STOP! Use an H1 tag instead, but put in a FONT SIZE tag to bring it back down a reasonable size again. That way the search engines get their H1 tags but your visitors see decent sized headings still. Here's an example that looks just like a standard H4 tag, but is given much higher priority by the search engines...

<h1><font size="3">My heading!</font></h1>

2. Use image ALT tags everywhere... Wherever you've got images on your site, whether it's your logo, your menu bar, or just making white space between paragraphs or table cells, use the ALT property of all your IMG tags to carry key words. Here's a good tip, too: Search engines tend to ignore images that are sized at 1 x 1 pixel (they know they're just there for the ALT tags), so use a 2 x 1 transparent GIF instead. It's invisible, takes almost no space on the page, but carries just as much 'search engine punch' as a full page graphic! Always insert just such a graphic as the very first line of HTML in each page's <BODY> section.

For example:

<body><img src="/blank.gif" width="1" height="2" border="0" alt="web marketing, web site marketing, internet web site marketing, web site marketing strategy, web marketing strategy, web site marketing plan, web marketing, internet marketing, marketing strategy, marketing plan">

3. Cross-link every page and site... Provide links from each page in your site to every other page so that when one gets indexed, they all get indexed. And if you run a number of different web sites, provide links from each site to all the others. You don't have to make a big thing of it, though. Remember, incoming links are counted as a point to score your web ranking by the search engine bots and incoming links are still incoming links, even if it is coming from a different page of the same website.

Here's an example of the HTML source for them:

<a href="http://somesite.xyz/page1.htm" style="font-size:1pt; color:#888888;">&middot;</a>

<a href="http://somesite.xyz/page2.htm" style="font-size:1pt; color:#888888;">&middot;</a>

<a href="http://somesite.xyz/page3.htm" style="font-size:1pt; color:#888888;">&middot;</a>

<a href="http://somesite.xyz/page4.htm" style="font-size:1pt; color:#888888;">&middot;</a>

... and so on. You're not expecting your visitors to click them at all - they're just there to boost the 'external link count' that search engines keep for each page they index, and to tell search engines to index the rest of the site. One other trick that you should use in your meta tags is to include 'robot guides' that tell spiders to index and follow all your links. A complete meta tag section (to be put in the HEAD section of your HTML page) might look like this:

<head>

<title>Put a short sentence about your site here!</title>

<meta name="description" content="Put the SAME title sentence here!"> <meta name="keywords" content="Put your keywords here!">

<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">

<meta name="distribution" content="global">

<meta name="author" content="Put your name here!">

</head>

4. Use different page titles... For every page you create, make sure you work out the keywords and phrases for that page individually. Then you add a unique and very relevant title to the page, trying to include as many of that page's key words as possible. Once you've done that, there are three places where the same title needs to appear on a single page:

i. The <TITLE> tag in the <HEAD> section.

ii. The DESCRIPTION meta tag.

iii. The first <H1> tag on the page itself.

5. Put keyword links in every paragraph... This can be tedious to do, especially if you change the content of your pages often. It can also be an interesting job if you're dynamically generating page content (from a database of articles, for example). Search engines LOVE pages that are heavily laden with links to other pages, but only if those links are part of natural language sentences. That means that for every key word that gets mentioned anywhere in the entire site, you should ideally make that word a link which goes to an appropriate page.

I always make a link that goes to the last article I wrote about the same company. That gives search engines a logical trail to follow for that company name, and my search engine ranking for searches on that company name goes sky high! If necessary, if you haven't got other pages yet that you can link to for certain words, set up special 'glossary' pages that explain the term in simple English, and link to those. The search engines will love them.

And those are the real obvious rules for making your pages friendly enough for all the major search engines to pick them up, read them, index them, and serve them up to thousands of visitors every month.

SUBMIT YOUR SITE

So now that you've done the back-breaking work of optimising every page on your site, you need to tell as many search engines as possible, starting with the big ones. Yahoo, Google, MSN, AOL to begin with since that covers almost 90% of the entire search engine market. Many of them feed information to a number of other search engines.

REFRESH YOUR LISTINGS REGULARLY

Sadly, one of the biggest problems with search engines is that, with the huge amounts of information that web masters are dumping into them daily, even a top-ranked listing is going to be displaced sooner or later, unless it's re-indexed (and treated as 'new') on a regular basis.

Submit your sites to all of the search engines and directories you can find at the beginning of each month, without fail. It doesn't take long once you've got the routine figured out.

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Peter Hoggan profile image

Peter Hoggan  says:
13 months ago

<h1><font size="3">My heading!</font></h1>

Font, size and color tags/attributes are no longer part of the html language. If you put this on the page you will generate unnecessary code and making the website difficult to update and maintain. Furthermore, the document will fail to validate as standards compliant. Better to use an external CSS file to control layout.

<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">

This is what spiders do by default and is a totally unnecessary line of code.

Heading tags go from <h1> to <h6> there is no <h7>.

Putting keywords in invisible images could be seen as spam. If the image is purely decorative use a blank alt tag. If you need to use images as spacers in order to get the page to render properly the page design is fundamentally flawed. Also, from an accessibility point of view, if someone using a screen reader was to visit the page and every alt attribute was stuffed with keywords can you imagine how frustrating that would be.

Hope this helps.

cshenterprise profile image

cshenterprise  says:
13 months ago

Thanks Peter, I will update my information and will leave your post so that other readers will get the most accurate and updated information.

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