1. Keywords
- If you are going to optimize your site, you have to
know the keywords that people are using to find products,
services or information similar to yours. Since it's your
business, you may feel you know what those are, but you
will want to check with a keyword research tool to find
out which terms are most often used and to find variations.
Look at
the title and keyword meta tags of competitors sites to
see what words other businesses believe to be relevant.
Check those in a keyword tool, too.
There are some free keyword
tools, such as Wordtracker
&
Keyword
Discovery, but I think it’s worth it to buy
the subscription and WordTracker does offer a free
trial.
Here's another article
with more on Keyword
Selection.
2. Content
– Make sure it is unique, relevant and useful to
your customer or target audience. Use your keyword research
to suggest what your content should be. Yes, you should
also consider what human visitors want, but you must write
your content to match the search terms humans are typing
into search engines to reach a site like yours. Your home
page should be tailored to the keyword phrase you decide
to target as your primary phrase. Create additional pages
for each additional phrase.
3. Navigation
– Set Up Search Engine Friendly navigation. You
can make simple text links or set up CSS menus to achieve
the same results, but you want to use your keyword phrases
in text links to your interior pages.
4. File
Names for Internal Pages – Name interior
pages according to their content. If your site is about
widgets and you find there are searches for red widgets,
blue widgets and discount widgets, then you would want
to have content pages named: red-widgets.html, blue-widgets.html
and discount-widgets.html and so on. Use hyphens rather
than underscores to separate the keywords in the file
name.
5. Graphics
Names – Name logically, but with keywords
where appropriate. So, rather than logo.jpg consider using
widget-company-logo.jpg.
6. Title Tag
– Use your primary keyword phrase as the first 3
words in your title tag. This tag may be up to 80 characters.
7. Meta Description
Tag – This is not really a tag that is
factored in for your ranking, but you want to write an
“optimized” tag using your keyword phrase
because people tend to click on listings that use the
same phrase that they typed into the search bar. This
tag should be 200-250 characters.
8. Meta Keyword
Tag – this tag is believed to be ignored
by Google and most of the ther major search engines, but
for some crawler based indexes it may be helpful.
9. Unique
Tags - Make unique title and meta description
tags for every page on your site.
10. H1, H2, H3
Tags - Use your keyword phrase in an h1 tag at
the top of the page. Use the h1 tag once. For additional
headings, use the h2 and h3 tags. Think headings as you
would an outline for an article. Use the longer related
phrases in your sub headings.
11. First Paragraph - Use
your target keyword phrase the first paragraph of the
page content.
12. Use your target keyword
phrase in bold somewhere on the page
13. Use your target keyword
phrase in a link:
- from
the home page to an internal page
- from
your home page to an authority site
- from
internal pages back to the home page (this should be
an absolute link- that is, a link to http://www.yourdomain.com
and not to index.html.
14. If
it’s appropriate use the target phrase elsewhere:
- In
alt tags of graphics
- In
italics
- Capitalized
(first character only)
- In
a bulleted list
15. Don’ts:
Avoid Flash, frames and javascript. If you must use Flash,
then provide an HTML alternative for every page. If you
must use javascript, call it from the server, rather than
loading the page with script. And if you must use frames,
just don’t. No frames. Period.
