Building a site with Search Engine Optimisation in Mind.

SEO is made up of two parts, ‘On Page’ optimisation, which is all about the words on the site’s pages, and ‘Off Page’ optimisation, which is all about the links from other sites, these days this including links and ‘mentions’ in the Social Media arena.

On Page SEO

Maximising ‘On page search engine optimisation’ means using the Right Words in the Right Place in the Right Way.

• The Right Words, are obtained through deep keyword research and by applying a fair amount of thought to the problem. Overall this is probably about 80% research and 20% educated guess work.
  
  
• The Right Place on a websites pages refers to placing the words in the areas that the Search Engines look.
  
  The most important place is the Meta Title (this is the area in the Header area of a webpage which is seen in the browser, in that top blue bar). This area ‘tells’ the Engines what the page is supposed to be about. In general you can assume that they will look at about the first 9 words, ignoring the rest. These words need to be chosen with care and the same ones should NOT be used throughout the site.
  
  It should also be born in mind that these words will be used in the Search Engine Listings, so even thought they don’t have to be ‘English’ in the sense of making sense, make sure that it does not look like ‘nonsense’ as this may put people off visiting the site.
  
  The other area that counts is of course the words on the page. Here it is the way the words are used that counts (see below). However, remember that you can use the space ‘below the fold’ to place words as well. This practise will allow you to have a short / concise looking page for the causal visitor, while having more detailed information for those needing more info, as well of course of providing the Search Engine Spiders with those all needed words.
  
  Remember too that the file names used are important too and can assist in your rankings. So use keyword rich page URL’s, extending this to the file names used for images (‘horse riding in France.jpg’ being so much more powerful than ‘img001.jpg’ in the battle for rankings in Google’s Image Search, which in turn will help with gaining rankings in the Search Engine’s listings).
  
  
• The Right Way to use these words on the page centres two issues. The first being that they words you are trying to target will normally be 2 to 4 words long. It is therefore important to try to use these phrases in the copy (the words on the page) in the same order. Don’t worry if you cannot use them the same way more than a couple of times on a page (be sure to check out the article on ‘writing for the search engines’). Where it is difficult, use parts of the phrase, as well as words that mean the same thing (e.g. equine for horse) as the Engines are very good at understanding that they are about the same thing.
  
  The second refers to the use of the ‘old fashioned’ HTML tags like H1, H2, Li and Strong. These days most designers use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), these being used by the Browser to work out how to render (display) the words on the page, e.g. a certain ‘style’ will tell the Browser to make the words look 12 pixels high in Red.
  
  There is no standard in CSS however, you can construct any style you like and call it what you want, thus the Engines cannot tell what is important and what it not, this being critical when the site owner is trying to convince the Engines that his page really is about ‘horse riding holidays’ or whatever.
  
  So, if you want to add weight to ‘argument’ that your page is about horse riding holidays, you need to place these keywords in a Header tag (H1) and then support this with other lesser Header tags (they range from H2 to H6) as well as using the List item tag (Li) and the Bold and Strong tags (b) and (strong). Placing words in these tags will inform the Engines that these are the important words on the page and will therefore assist you in gaining rankings for these targeted keywords.
  
  Also remember that these keywords should be used in the ALT tags of images and more importantly in the Anchor text in links on the page. This anchor text refers to the words (normally) underlined in blue (the bit you click on). This is used in two critical ways, it first tells the Engines what the page it is going to is all about (this being true whether it is an internal or external link) and secondly and as importantly, it implies that the page the link is ON is also relevant to that anchor text, a very useful way of gaining extra points in the ranking game indeed.The fact that the Engines ignore most punctuation should also be considered (see the SEO article and other associated articles) as this can help when trying to bring together a series of words to make a target keyphrase.eyword Density is also a factor that needs to be considered, try to aim for between 2% and 4% (for Google). You can get away with more than this, but much more can de dangerous and can actually cause you to loose rankings.
  
  Here it is important to think globally about the pages on your site, don’t overdo anything, i.e don’t use dozens of words in the ALT tags and keep your file names sensible too.
  
  Try too hard and the Engines will smell a furry rodent (rat) and penalise you, so just be sensible and use 'Off Page' Optimisation as well and you will get better rankings.
  
  More tomorrow