On-Page SEO : How to Optimize Your Web Pages for Search Engines

When you search for something at a search engine like Google, you will find that certain website pages appear at the top of the results you see. If you look at the top line, you will also find that the pages displayed are just the first ten or so of thousands (or millions) of pages for that topic.

Searchers are not likely to go to all the thousands of pages. Instead, they will most likely restrict themselves to the first two or three search result pages. Three search results pages mean just 30 or so Web pages dealing with the searched topic. Unless your own web page gets among these top 30 or so pages, it is not likely to be seen by searchers.

Getting to the top of search results involves two major categories of actions:

• Optimizing your web page for search engines, and
• Creating good links pointing to your web page from other web pages.

In this article, we look page optimization.

On-Page SEO

Identify the search terms searchers use: Search engine optimization starts with identifying the specific words that searchers use to search. These specific words must be used on your web page. Otherwise, it will not be considered relevant for the words searchers actually use.

Use a tool like Keyword Discovery to identify what words searchers use to search for your topic.

Optimize the HTML code: You have to go to the underlying HTML code to optimize your Web pages. Use an HTML code editor like NoteTab to access the code for your web page.

Use the search words, called 'keywords', in the following HTML tags of your page code. Avoid keyword stuffing by repeating the words meaninglessly, however. Keyword stuffing can lead to search engine penalties.

Title Tag: The title tag is the primary resource search engines use to check what your page is about. Omitting the title tag or omitting to include your keywords in the tag is a big mistake. Use the keywords in a natural manner.

Description Tag: Search engines often use the contents of your description tag as the description of the page in the search results they display. Make the description interesting in addition to including your keywords.

Heading Tags: Search engines give higher weight to words in the h1, h2 and h3 heading tags. Don't forget to use your keywords in these tags.

Body Content: Use the keywords in the first paragraph and last paragraph, and sprinkle them throughout the body content, without overdoing it.

Anchor Text: Anchor text means the visible, highlighted text you see in clickable links. Use keywords instead of generic words like 'Click Here' as link text.

Alt Text, Titles: You can include an alt attribute for image tags, and title attribute for most tags. Include keywords in alt and title wordings.

Emphasized Words: Emphasize keyword-containing text in the body, in a natural way, making them bold, italic, etc.

Keywords Tag: You can use the main keywords, and related words, in the keywords tag. Make sure that you use only the words actually used in the body content.

Use SEO-oriented Page Design: Design of the Web page also has significant impact on SEO.

Text Content: Include reasonable amount of text in your web page content. Text-based search engines cannot understand the significance of pictures and other graphic elements, and will not be able to index your page for relevant topics.

Code Layout: If incidental code like JavaScript or CSS dominates your web page code, search engines will have to wade through all these to reach your content. They might not even wait till they reach the content. Put the keyword rich content towards the top of your web page code.

Validate: Invalid HTML can prevent search engines from going through your page. Use code-validators at http://validator.w3.org/ or elsewhere to check the validity of your code.

Page URL: Search engines might consider the name of your web page to identify what it is about. Best use a name that contains your keywords.

The above guidelines will help you optimize your web page. You will then have to create good in-pointing links to that page to improve its search engine position. We will discuss that in another article.