Learn SEO Basic
Pre-SEO Website Analysis — Introduction
Before embarking on applying on-page SEO to the pages of a website it makes a whole lot of sense to do a thorough analysis of the website to identify any areas of the website could cause issues when applying on-page SEO to pages of the website.
This material describes briefly what should be done during the thorough analysis of the website prior to doing on-page SEO.
Architecture Of The Website
Check the site architecture carefully for SEO friendly URL formation, especially if CMS like Joomla or WordPress have been used to power the website. Ensure there is no broken navigation and links — (either internal i.e. across a single page or external links i.e. across multiple pages)
SEO Basic Concepts Part 1
You can build a great-looking website with excellent navigation and brilliant content, that’s just half the job done.
If this site cannot be found by anyone then it simply lies unseen. This would be such a waste, especially for those who would benefit by accessing the website content but do not know how to find it on the Internet.
Finding Content On The Internet
When attempting to find content on the Internet, seekers normally query a search engine. (Google is an excellent example of one)
Seekers normally key in a word (or a set of words) into the search engine’s, search box, to tell the search engine what kind of content they are seeking. As shown in Diagram 1.
SEO Basic Concepts Part 2
Search Engine Strategies
Perhaps the most important and inexpensive technique is to rank high for your preferred keywords in the main search engines in organic or natural searches. Search engines send robot spiders to gather information about the content of your webpage and add this to their search index, so let´s begin with steps to prepare your web pages for optimal indexing. The objective here is not plan to trick the search engine’s robots or spiders, but to leave them abundant clues within web page content as to what your web page is all about.
The technique of leaving abundant clues within web page content as to what your web page is all about is called Search Engine Optimization, often abbreviated to SEO.
SEO Basic Concepts Part 3
Carefully position your keywords in the first paragraph of the body text of your web page if possible. Search engines expect that your first paragraph will contain the important keywords for the document. The first paragraph is a place where a lot of content creators write an introduction about the content of the page.
NOTE: Please do not artificially stuff keywords in the first paragraph. More is definitely not better with search engines. To keep Google happy keep a keyword density in the entire body text of maybe up to 2% for a word that should rank high, do not overdo it Google does penalize websites that stuff keywords in body content hoping to get a high search engine result page ranking.
The page title and the page headline
Let’s start by making some simple changes to a web page that will make it interesting to a search engine when the page is being indexed.
All web pages should have a title which is displayed in the Browser’s title bar, right at the top of a Browser window.
All to often the importance of the page title is ignored by many techies when they are busy creating the HTML code that will display a page’s content in a Browser.
Page title content, which is displayed in the Title Bar of any Browser, is taken from between the <title> </title> tags contained in the HTML program.
META Keywords — What they do for S.E.O
META Keywords used within an HTML page are handled differently by Google when compared to how all the other search engines handle them.
Let’s take a look at how Google handles META Keywords — In one word — Google ignores META Keywords, but then Google is not the only search engine used on the Internet.
A lot of the other search engines such as Yahoo, MSN, Bing, Ask Jeeves (and a host of others) still pay attention to the META Keywords used on the web page.
So what are META Keywords? They are keywords especially chosen to help describe the contents of the web page.
Choosing the right Keywords
In lesson 3 we took a look how and where keywords are added to an HTML page.
We also understood the reasons why keywords are needed in a webpage’s HTML code. Apparently keywords impact a page’s rank within a search engine (except for Google which simply ignores keywords).
Google believes that webmasters have abused keywords for very long by stuffing keywords where page viewers would not see them but search engine spiders would.
Hence Google no longer uses keywords as a judgement parameter to affect the page rank of a webpage within in their results page.
Using tools to get keywords
In Choosing the right keywords, you understood how to target keywords for use in the web page. Regretfully, sometimes our assumptions about keywords do not match the keywords that seekers actually use when searching for the kind of content contained in our website.
Today, rather than trying to guess what keywords are being used to search for kind of content our website offers, you can definitive answers by using tools available on the Internet.
Some of the keyword suggestion tools are available free for use some you have to pay to use them. Fortunately the results obtained from both types of tools do not vary substantially.
Most tools that are free for use also have a set of reports available that you have to pay a modest sum of money to access. These reports would normally contain some specialized information not available when the tool is used for free.
Choosing a final set of keywords
In the Lesson — Choosing the right keywords we created a list of keywords by studying the page content and highlighting appropriate keywords or key phrases and then entering this into an Excel spreadsheet, one keyword / key phrase on a line.
Once this brainstorming session was complete, the next process would be to enter these keywords / key phrases into the Google Keyword finder tool as described in Lesson — Using tools to obtain right keywords.
The Google keyword suggestion tool will in turn offer a whole lot of alternative keywords, carefully extracted from its search history that seekers are using when they wish to locate similar / identical content on the Internet. Hence, these are appropriate for use on your web page within its META keyword tag.
The Google keyword tool will also permit the exporting these keywords to a comma delimited text file that can be uploaded into Excel easily.
On Page Search Engine Optimization — An Approach
When crafting a new website, it’s best to handle the on-page SEO work for the website pages in two steps.
Step One:
The bare minimum SEO applied on the page and the page is let loose to the Internet community.
Step Two:
Subsequently, after the website is up and running a far more detailed SEO processes can be applied, which will support and enhance the SEO done earlier Then the upgraded page is let loose to the Internet community again but will have a much ranking on search engine pages after step two.
Step one is a quick run through the content of all the pages of the website to try and get as many pages SEO friendly as is possible. Step Two is a more painstakingly thorough process that ensures complete on-page SEO for each page.
Optimization of Page Load Times:
Google has officially stated that page load time is now a factor in Google’s page ranking algorithm. Hence the faster a page loads the happier the Google search engine will be which will have its impact on page rank.
Even though Google states that page load time only affects less than 1% of queries, this is still 1% of 100+ billion searches a month.
Hence, it really makes sense to able to check the page load times a website. They're a lot of great and excellent tools that do just this. Not only do the tools give you information about your web page load times, but they also make a number of real useful suggestions on how to improve the web page load time as well.
Not only tell you what’s wrong with the web page, they tell you how to fix it as well.
If you wish to learn more on SEO, do checkout my Search Engine Optimization Course and Digital Marketing Course.
