Optimizing Your Website
October 14th, 2008Once you have done your keyword research and chosen your keywords carefully, the next stage in achieving a higher search engine rank is optimizing your website.
For maximum traffic you should aim to optimize each page on your website for a different keyword phrase and you should make sure that the keyword phrase that you pick for your home page or the main page of your website gets a good number of searches per month.
Here are the main places on a web page that you should put your keywords when you are optimizing your website:
- In the <TITLE> tags – this is the text that is displayed along the title bar of your browser
- In the Headline tags - especially the <H1> tag
- In the ALT attributes of images – mention your keywords in one or two of the alt attributes of any of the images on your page
- Through out the body of your web page – ensuring that your keywords are mentioned at the beginning, middle and end
- In the anchor text of links – if you have any links to this page elsewhere on your website try to make sure that the anchor text (clickable text) has your keywords in it.
- In the <META> tags – although the main search engines no longer use these tags for ranking, you may want to mention your keywords in the keywords tag and in the description tag. The description tag is used by Google and other search engines to display a summary of your site when it is displayed in the search engine results.
Optimizing your website doesn’t have to be a complicated process – just make sure you mention your keywords in all of these places. At the same time, don’t over do it as keyword spamming can have the opposite affect!
Taking an extra 10 minutes to do this when creating a new website can mean the difference between lots of traffic and no traffic.
October 18th, 2008 at 5:50 am
Suzanne,
This is a nice clear description, all in one place for keyword optimization of web pages.
I sometimes forget to optimize the ALT attributes and the anchor text of links for the relevant keywords. Thanks for the reminder.
November 11th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Hi Suzanne,
I do not know a lot about optimizing my web pages, so thanks for being there. You make it sound so simple. I must have a few hundred keywords and I am in the process of choosing the best ones. I just wanted to say thanks for your help.
December 10th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Hi Suzanne,
Thank you so much for putting this is terms that the “technologically challenged” ( that’s me ) can understand. Between your SEO Lessons Course, your SEO ebook and your other expert advice I think I can actually begin doing it myself now.
December 24th, 2008 at 8:13 am
Hi Suzanne,
Thanks for your valuable help.
We’re wondering about SEO tips and tricks,
and you had laid a solid step byu step guide which
had been very helpful for beginners like us.
Thanks once again.
February 12th, 2009 at 6:49 am
Hi Suzanne,
I am enjoying reading your 3 Steps To Search Engine Success.
Great information and well put. Thanks for making this available.
February 17th, 2009 at 12:57 am
Hi Suzanne,
I’m a complete newbie when it comes to making any type of changes to my website (PIPS). Am I allowed to make changes, including the changing of the name of my website? You make things so clear and I want to get at it. Just need to know how. I do feel it needs some changing to accomplish what I want. Thanks for all your help and I’m looking forward to the next lesson.
February 17th, 2009 at 11:51 am
Hi Evelyn,
Yes, you are allowed to make changes to your website for PIPS (Plug-In Profit site). You will find more information about this over at my Plug-In Profit Site blog. I also have an SEO Update Service specifically for PIPS as well.
Cheers,
Suzanne
March 17th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Hi Suzanne,
I recently got introduced to your website and the info you provide. You are really marvelous and you do offer great info.
One more question: would you kindly tell us something about keyword density? Should it be from 1-3% ?
Best regards from Germany
Asem
March 17th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
Hi Asem,
Thanks – I am glad you have found the information useful.
Personally I try not to worry too much about keyword density. I just try to mention my keyword phrases throughout the web page without over doing it and make sure that it looks natural for visitors.
If you are worried about keyword density, I would recommend:
- keeping it under 5%
- checking the keyword density of some of your main competitors for the phrase you are targeting and aim for a similar density for your own site
Cheers,
Suzanne
April 13th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
Hi Suzanne,
At long last I have now changed to a WP site and am starting again from scratch and am following every step of your superb posts.
I will be in touch later when hopfully you can critique my site for me,
regards,
Mal.
May 19th, 2009 at 6:44 pm
Thank you so much.
I have learned allot from this website.Thank you
Ok i have a qustion that i found a keyword that has 60,000 search per month, and there is also no competetior for that keyword.
But that keyword was not a common word.
That was just a keyword like “work for” “on the top” and “go with”
So my qustion is,can you optimize for these type of keywords.
I will be very thankful to you.
June 1st, 2009 at 11:01 am
Hi Bilal,
I suspect that you forgot to select “Exact” from the match menu (the drop down menu on the top right hand side above the keyword list produced from the Google Adwords tool).
Many keywords that are partial phrases such as “work for”, “go to” etc will show as a large number of searches per month because you have selected broad match, which includes all phrases that contain that phrase.
If you choose “Exact” from the menu you will get a more accurate number of searches per month.
Personally I wouldn’t optimize for a phrase that didn’t make sense or a phrase that is incomplete. My first priority is my visitors, and doing something like this would look very odd in most cases.
Cheers,
Suzanne
June 1st, 2009 at 12:36 pm
In regard to the keyword density question by Asem. This may not apply to keyword density as applied to web-pages, however, I recently received a notification from SYA that they couldn’t submit one of my articles to EzineArticles because the keyword density was 2%. So I went through the article and reduced the number of times that keyword phrase ( home business ) was used to 1% by only using it four times in an article with slightly over four hundred words. It was used nine times before. Until then I didn’t worry about keyword density in my article writing. Hopefully someone will find this helpful.
June 30th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Hi Suzanne
I am truly grateful to you because i understood the importance of SEO for success of online business from you. I have subscribed your email training and downloaded everything you offered on SEO.
Thanks
July 1st, 2009 at 8:13 am
You site is very informative.I have really learn allot from your site.
This is perfect for newnes.
August 16th, 2009 at 9:34 am
Hi Suzanne,
thank you for this invaluable information, it’s so nice to have these important steps explained in plain English and not some high tech computer language that only experts can understand. Thanks to your expert help I am getting the grasp of SEO.
Keep up the great work!
August 20th, 2009 at 7:38 pm
Hi Suzanne,
that was informative info. I really appreciated for informing us that.
I was wondering about how to optimize my site but by your courses it seems it’s simple to do.
Thanks,
Imran
August 22nd, 2009 at 8:14 am
Dear Madam,
I am much thankful to you for providing lessons on SEO. I really enjoy learning SEO from your informative lessons.
Thanks again and best regads-