A Beginner’s Guide On How To Optimizing Your Website For Your Keywords.

Now that you've got the list of keywords (See previous article) you want to target, it’s time to optimize your website around those keywords. The goal is to get as much visitor traffic as you can from potential customers who enter your keywords into search engines.

The first thing to keep in mind is that search engine technology has evolved a lot over the past few years, and it is much better at identifying well-written sites that provide visitors with high-quality, well-organized information. So, your goal should be to focus on providing your visitors with good content and a pleasant overall experience. With this in mind, it’s time to start re-writing (or writing) your web pages to incorporate your keywords in the best ways you can.

Group your keywords to optimize individual web pages

It is important to realize that all on-page SEO is performed on a page-by-page basis, and that it is not critical to optimize every single page (at least not right away). While a site containing many high-ranking pages will provide “clout” to all the pages in the site, search results for given keywords still point to individual pages, and so you need to focus on selecting individual pages and optimizing them one at a time.

The first step is grouping and organizing your keywords into logical collections of 5-10 keywords that can be the focus of individual pages. You will chose one of these to be the “lead” term (for example, to be included in the page title and main heading, among other places), with the others to appear in various places throughout the page. This step helps make the whole process more manageable while also helping you create targeted, specific pages.

Prioritize your keyword groups from most important to least important and proceed to select pages on your site (or create new ones) that will be targeted by each set of 5-10 related keywords.

Remember both layers of on-page optimization

Before continuing, it’s helpful to introduce the two layers in which you will be implementing keywords on your web pages:

1. Content:The text that actually appears on your website, for visitors to read. This includes headings, body text and image captions.
2. Meta-data: The text that appears in the HTML code of a website and is not necessarily seen by visitors. Examples include the title tag, the meta-description tag, image attributes and even page and image URLs.

Search engines scan both layers, and analyze what they find to determine how to index your web pages. For this reason, it is very important to do everything possible to ensure that your keywords are properly implemented in ways that encourage the search engines to rank your pages ahead of your competitors. The more you optimize your website content and meta-data using your keywords, the better the search engines will “understand” what your site has to say, which helps them send you search visitors who are actively seeking the information you have available on your website.

It goes without saying that the higher your pages rank for your keywords in search result pages, the more (and more relevant) search traffic you will receive to your website.

Checklist: Part one

• Optimizing your page content

1. Use keywords in headings: This is most important for top-level headings (<h1> in HTML), but is certainly valuable in <h2> headings as well (when your page contains multiple sections of text). Most SEO experts don’t consider <h3> headings and below more valuable than regular page text. Besides the SEO benefits, when visitors see headings that mention what they’re looking for, they’re more likely to stick around and read the page. Make sure that the heading closely relates to the body text following it. Additional tips: Use one primary keyword per heading, and keep headings shorter than about 75 characters.
2. Use keywords in page text: Use your keywords naturally, in ways that provide a smooth and expected reading experience. Repeat your target keywords, and variations of them, throughout the page only as much as is reasonable for the content itself. “Keyword stuffing”―repeating keywords many times―worked in the early days of search engines, but can now penalize the page.
3. Use keywords in internal links: It is important to have at least a couple of relevant text links from others pages in your site to the page you are optimizing. The text of each link (known as the “anchor text”) should contain a keyword for which the target page is optimized. For example: <a href="targetpageURL">Use keywords here, in the displayed link text</a>
4. Use keywords in questions: Because many searchers enter search terms such as “What is/are ___” and “How do I___”, search engines tend to give priority to pages that ask―and answer―these kinds of questions. Consider asking these questions using your keywords in headings, followed by a paragraph that answers the question, starting with a keyword. For example, “What is Business Intelligence?” in a heading, followed by a paragraph starting, “Business Intelligence is ___”.
5. Use keywords in image captions: Captions below or alongside images are an excellent opportunity to repeat important keywords without them overloading the main page content.

Checklist: Part Two

• Optimizing your page metadata

1. Use keywords in the title tag: Every webpage can have a title that appears in the browser tab where the page is displayed (in HTML, this appears as <title>Page Title Goes Here<title> which is placed within the <head> section of the page code). Search engines use this title in two ways: as a strong signal for what the page contains and as the page title shown in search results. Therefore, the title needs to include the most important keyword you’re targeting for that page in a way that is natural and that encourages relevant searchers to click on it. Ideally, the page’s lead keyword should appear at or near the start of the title. It’s also a good idea to include a second keyword here as well. Additional tips: As a rule of thumb, the title should be shorter than about 65 characters so that it’s not cut of when being displayed by Google, and no two pages on your site should contain the same title.
2. Use keywords in the meta-description tag: Web-pages also have a “description” field that should briefly describe what the page is about. (In HTML, this content is coded in a meta tag, which is also placed within the page’s <head> section, like this: <meta name="description" content="Page description goes here">.) Because search engines often (though not always) display this text under the page title in search results, the most important use of this text is to encourage searchers to click on the page in the search results (which, in turn, helps improve the page’s ranking over time). Therefore, make sure to include one or two of your keywords in this description field. You should include at least one keyword at, or near, the beginning of the text. Additional tips: Limit the description text to around 150 characters, don’t use the same meta-description on more than one page, and avoid the use of any “special” characters. For more meta-description tips, click here. Note that most search engines don’t analyze this text anymore for the purposes of ranking pages.
3. Use keywords in page and image URLs: Search engines pay attention to words found in the file names of pages, as well as the URLs of the individual elements (e.g., images) that appear within a page. This is a valuable additional way to tell search engines what your pages are about. So, for example, instead of naming a page with a generic name like domain.com/product, you should name it along the lines of domain.com/natural-air-fresheners. The same goes for images and other elements referenced in page code. Additional tips: Separate individual words with hyphens, and avoid the use of “special” characters.

Checklist: Part Two

• Use keywords in anchor tag titles: We've already mentioned using keywords in the displayed “anchor text” of links. The <a> tag provides an additional opportunity to associate your target keywords with a page. For links pointing back to a page, use the target page’s keywords in the title value as well, like this: <a href="targetpageURL" title="Keywords here">). Note that while including keywords in the link anchor text is very valuable, this title attribute is considered less important for SEO purposes.
• Use keywords in image tags: The HTML tag used to show images in a web-page (<img>) allows optional attributes such as alt and title (which have multiple uses, including improved site accessibility for users with poor vision). Because search engines use these texts both to index images during image searches and also as signals regarding the overall page content, this is another place you want your keywords to appear.

For example: <img src="beagle-puppy.png" alt="beagle puppy" title="4-week-old beagle puppy">.

Additional tips: Avoid using “special” characters, and limit the length of these texts to about 80 characters each.

Our next post we will see  on the tactics to avoid when refining your SEO. I do also hope this first part has been great of great information to you. Hold on and just stay tuned and in touch.

End of Part Two of our Beginners Guide( How To Optimize Your Website for SEO)

Part One: How To Optimize Your Website For SEO

Credit:

Original Source: AddThis

Reviewed & Revised: Online Incomecrack