5 - Making Your Content Writing Search Engine Friendly

Making Your Content Writing Search Engine Friendly

Write for People, Not Search Engines

The ultimate goal of any search engine optimization (SEO) campaign is to achieve long-standing, organic rankings with popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Although content is not the only thing that search-engine algorithms take into consideration when ranking a web site, content is arguably the most important. Therefore, if your goal is to obtain high organic rankings for your web site, you must produce high-quality, original content that contains the keywords that you want to rank for.

Write Original, Persuasive, and Natural Content

If your content is original, persuasive, and has a natural tone, search engines tend to recognize it as worthwhile and therefore rank it positively. Conversely, if your content is overly stuffed with keywords and the only purpose of the content is to manipulate search-engine results, search engines will eventually remove your content from their index, in which case it will no longer appear in the search results. Packing too many keywords into your content creates an awkward tone and unnatural flow.

Structure Your Content with Your Reader in Mind

It is enormously important to outline and structure your content to be as helpful and informative as possible. Your content must address the gamut of possible questions and concerns your readers may have regarding your product, service or message.

Writing distinctly helpful and user-friendly content makes your page appealing to humans and search engines alike. Before writing any content, ask yourself some questions: What are the benefits of the product, message or service? What concerns would I have as a consumer or reader? What is truly exceptional about this product? By answering these types of questions, you alleviate any confusion or apprehensions your reader may have regarding your product, increasing your chances of conversion. People and search engines alike value comprehensive, useful information, not slogans and vague appraisals.

Avoid Poor Grammar

The search-engine spiders are aware that clumsy sentences and poor grammar are displeasing to human readers; therefore, your grammar should be of the highest caliber. Search engines tend to devalue any content containing awkward sentences, clichés, erroneous grammar, or writing considered aesthetically abrasive to a reader. By keeping your story elegant and distinctive, you increase your web site’s chance of attainting high search-engine rankings. It is also important to keep your content accessible to the average reader.

Do not alienate the average reader by writing in a style more befitting to a doctoral dissertation than a web page. However, content that comes across as elementary is going to generate minimal excitement and make your site look unprofessional. The key to writing accessible yet impressive content is determining the level at which your target audience reads.

Write Useful and Informative Content

It is important that your content be informative, concise, and easy to navigate. Readers on the web are said to have an exceptionally short attention span. For this reason, write in a concise manner and use headings, subheadings, bold type, and similar formatting that illustrate the information contained in each subsequent section of your page.

Start all subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words or action phrases that users can notice while scanning down your content. Keep in mind that users visit your web site with a specific objective in mind. Readily accessible information increases the reader’s chances of achieving an objective in a timely fashion. Readers are more likely to purchase or subscribe to your product or service if you make it easy for them.

Write a Compelling Headline

As I wrote in my article “10 Indispensable SEO Content Writing Tips!”, the headlines to the articles you write are crucial… you have less than 10 seconds to attract the user’s attention. Your headline is around “90 percent of the reason anyone will read your ad copy,” so make sure your title will interest the reader enough to pull them in immediately, while clearly explaining the content. Placing a keyword into the headline is also a great idea.

Use Bold-Type Headings

Provide bold-type headings that inform on the nature of each subsection, affording the reader on overview of the site’s benefits at a glance. Furnishing readers with easily accessible, detailed information is the best way to keep them reading.

Many inexperienced copywriters make the mistake of writing their material in one large block of content without headings that grab the reader’s attention. Some readers are looking for specific information, and consider the task of reading the giant blocks of content to be too time consuming.

Write with an Original Voice

The process of becoming a skilled writer includes paying special attention to the originality of the writing. Originality requires you to make certain that your voice is the most powerful component of the content. Even if you are writing content that is technical in nature, you need to spend time to understand the material well enough to explain to the reader with your own voice.
Writing with an original voice makes your content valuable to search engines and naturally compelling to readers. Writing in a manner natural to you translates as natural to your audience.

Write Interesting Content in a Friendly Tone

Use the tone of your writing to capture your readers’ attention and keep them interested in your work. Employing a friendly tone in your writing will result in a positive response from virtually all your readers. You can use a friendly tone and humor in your copy to make your web site more personal and engaging. One of your main goals is to keep readers engaged long enough for them to read all the facts; the best way to accomplish this goal is to entertain while informing.
Keep your content interesting and persuasive, and you will be pleased to find that not only people but also search engines will enjoy it. It is a fact that the vast majority of content that is ranked on the front page of major search engines tends to be the content that is deemed most valuable and interesting to readers. Therefore, write quality content that people like, and search engines will rank it accordingly.

Content Writing Length

There are many opinions out there about the length of content that search engines like. I don’t believe that there is any magical number, but I personally believe that the ideal length would be anywhere from 300 to 1200 words. As an example, this lesson has a little over 2500 words according to the ‘word count’.

If you are writing for article submissions to directories such as EzineArticles.com, they will suggest that an ideal article size is 400-750 words, but no more than 5,000 words, as stated in their editorial guidelines. Many of these article submission sites will give guidelines to what they would like to see from you.

While you are writing your article, make sure to use keyword anchor text leading to other articles on your site as described in 4 – Optimizing Your Site with Tags! – Anchor Text

What’s the Right Keyword Density for Your Article?

The exact keyword density is hard to specify. It’s a measurement of the number of times that your keywords appear on the page versus the number of words on a page… a ratio, in other words.
A rule of thumb about keyword density would be to make sure your keyword or keyword phrase is in the title tag, the description and the H1 tag at minimum. Make sure you sprinkle a few variations of your keyword(s) throughout your site where it looks natural and makes sense as we spoke about in 2 – Keywords and Your Web Site!”- LSI keyword research.
Make sure you don’t abuse the system by keyword stuffing, which are too many keywords or a large amount of keyword phrases in your site’s text. Google will penalize you for this because it represents SPAM!
I have written an article about keyword density, in which I will leave the link at the end of this lesson. Make sure you read this article, because it will go into greater depth about keyword density, and ways of pleasing the search engines that others don’t know about, which will set you apart from the competition.

Avoid Duplicate Content

Another subject to touch on about content writing is duplicate content and the consequences for the identical content. Instead of getting in-depth about how to avoid duplicate content issues and their penalties, it would be much easier for you to read the article that I have written about the subject.
Once you have read the article about duplicate content, make sure you follow the link to Canonical Issues which is a whole other story about duplicate content. In my article, I will show you ways to avoid this issue for your blog.

Keeping Your Content Fresh

Content is also an element of SEO that needs to be maintained over time. Your content should change regularly… in some cases, that means every day; in others it means once a week or once a month. Even more important than the schedule with which you change your content is the content itself.
Over time you should be adding to your collection of relevant, useful content. If what you have on the site isn’t relevant or useful, then replace it… and don’t put any piece of content on your site that doesn’t give your visitors something useful. When adding new pages, you should also be adding internal page anchor text links making your site user-friendly.

Keyword-Enriched Web Site Makeover with Permalinks & the 301 Redirect!

STEP 1 – If you happen to be using the original WordPress ‘Default’ permalink as shown below, I would recommend that you change your permalink setting to the Custom Structure with the following word /%postname%/ in the box. What this will do for you is put your title wording into the URL instead of numbers. If your existing title (the title from the first time you saved the post) to your page has keywords in them, they will now show in the URL address bar, giving you an SEO advantage. When you make the change, your site links should continue to work, but it is always a good idea to check your links to make sure.

Once you have made this change and checked to make sure your links work correctly, it’s time to move on to the next step.

STEP 2 – If you would like to make changes to the URL file name (the string of words which are beyond the last forward slash “/” of your web site address) of any or all pages because they don’t contain your keywords, then you will have to do what is called a ‘301 redirect’ for each page that you decide to change.

Here’s an example of this page’s file name from the address bar above: /making-content-writing-search-engine-friendly-lesson-5/. This file name is purposely long for descriptive purposes during these lessons… if you look at any of my other pages that are not part of these lessons, they will contain only keywords or keyword phrases in the URL file name.
The reason that you will need to do a 301 redirect for any pages you decide to change are: most likely you have links out there in cyberspace that lead to your existing page(s), so you will need to re-direct those old pages to the new page.

Here is the 301 Redirect Plug-in for WordPress that I would recommend:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-301-redirects/ .

Once you install the plug-in and active it, you can find the 301 editor screen under Settings > 301 Redirects in the WordPress admin dashboard. You must be an administrator to edit your list of new redirects.

IMPORTANT: Before you make the change to a page’s file name, be sure to document the Top-Level part of the URL to place into the 301 redirect ‘Request’ box as shown below. The top-level part of the URL is the forward slash “/” along with the words that directly follow the domain name.

Example: If my domain URL shows “http://seoblogtips.com/seo-blog-tips/”, then the top level part of the URL would be the “/seo-blog-tips/”. If your URL has the WordPress blog installed into a folder (with the name “blog”, or any other folder name), example: http://seoblogtips.com/blog/seo-blog-tips/, then the top level would be “/blog/seo-blog-tips/”.

I know I’m repeating myself, but I can’t stress the importance enough… make sure you copy the top-level of the wording exactly as it appears in the address bar, including the forward slash “/” directly after the .com, .net. or .org, etc. to put into the ‘Request’ box… then put the new keyword-enriched complete URL into the ‘Destination’ box as shown and click Save Changes.


If you would like to learn more about a 301 Redirect, you can read my article on the subject:
http://seoblogoptimizer.com/301-redirect/ .

Below is a photo which shows the location to do the URL changes in your Edit Post box, if you choose to take on Step 2. All you need to do is click on the ‘Edit’ button, delete the old words, then add your main keyword or keyword phrase only, separating each word with a hyphen.

NOTE: When you do this step to create a newly keyword-enriched URL, do not add any additional words other than your keyword or keyword phrase… it will actually help your SEO efforts to leave out non-relevant words.

Here is a Plug-in to Compliment Step 2 (the 301 Redirect)

If you plan to do this work in step 2, then consider the following WordPress plug-in called SEO Slugs, located at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-slugs/!

What the SEO Slugs WordPress plugin does for you is remove the common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs (in a nutshell, the URL that I am talking about in Step 2) to improve search engine optimization.

For example, when you publish a post with a title like this: “What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings”, WordPress automatically assigns a long filename to your post, called a post slug: /what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings/.

SEO Slugs plugin strips common words like “what”, “you” or “can” out of your post slug to make it more search engine friendly. With SEO Slugs plug-in activated, the slug for our example blog post would look like this: /immediately-higher-rankings/

The slug is generated on automatic saving of draft (so you get a chance to look at it before publishing, and change it), or on publish.

One last NOTE about this plug-in: This plug-in has been tested compatible up to WordPress: 2.1.2, yet I am using it currently with my 3.0.1 version with no problems at all. I have been using this plug-in for a while now, so I thought I’d try it out on my Test Blog to see if it would automatically change the URL on an existing article to the shorter version as described above, and it did not.

What I am saying is that you will need to change the URL manually for existing articles, as I mentioned above. After the plug-in has been installed and activated, it will shorten your URL for any new articles that you write.

You’re on a Roll… Don’t Stop: If you know that changing the URL structure in Step 2 is of great SEO importance, then you need to consider setting aside some time to redo all of your highly important ‘Title tags’ using the All in One SEO Pack plug-in as described in 4 – Optimizing Your Site with Tags! – All in One SEO Pack – tags solution. While you are at it, you might as well fill in the description and the keywords section too.

Ping Your Blog When You Have Added Content or Updated Your Blog

Ping services allow you to automatically notify blog directories and search engines that your blog has been updated.

There are a few reasons that you should ping your blog… whenever a blog pings, many background processes happen which will get your blog quickly indexed by search engines as well as bring traffic from many other sources.

WordPress is known to ping your site by default each and every time you click on the Update button. This can cause a red flag for the search engines as spam, and possibly get your site banned. The solution to this issue is to add the plug-in MaxBlogPress, that will allow you to update your page within a period of time that you specify, without your site being pinged each time you click the Update button.

With this plug-in, you can add a large amount of ping sites to the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer box. I personally have only added the “Update Services” Codex list to the Ping Optimizer (this link is available on your WordPress Dashboard > Settings > Writing, then at the bottom of the page where it says Update Services), the remainder I go to each web site and manually ping by putting my URL in the box.

Keep in mind that the bigger your ping list, the greater the chances of receiving traffic from those sources. Below you will find a list of web sites that I recommend to manually ping your updated blog.

6 – Search Engine & Directory Submissions; SEO Tools & Plug-ins

6 Will be covering search engine submissions, submitting your site to directories, maximizing your exposure with RSS Submissions, HTML site validation and SEO browser tools & plug-ins.

Below are the links from this lesson in order of appearance (each link will open a new window or tab to allow you to easily return to this page for more link navigation.)

Here are the Links to My Articles:

10 Indispensable Content Writing Tips article http://seoblogoptimizer.com/seo-content-writing-tips/
Keyword Density http://seoblogoptimizer.com/keyword-density/
Duplicate Content http://seoblogoptimizer.com/avoiding-duplicate-content/
Canonical Issues http://seoblogoptimizer.com/url-canonicalization-wordpress/

301 Redirect Article & WordPress Plug-ins

Here is the 301 Redirect Plug-in for WordPress that I would recommend:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-301-redirects/

Here is the 301 Redirect article that I wrote: http://seoblogoptimizer.com/301-redirect/.
WordPress plug-in SEO Slugs: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-slugs/!

Ping Plug-in & Ping Web Sites

The MaxBlogPress plug-in: http://www.maxblogpress.com/plugins/mpo/

Here is the list of web sites to manually ping your updated blog:

http://blogbuzzer.com/
http://www.pingler.com/
http://pingomatic.com/
http://www.pingoat.com/
http://feedshark.brainbliss.com/

4 - Optimizing Your Site with Tags

Optimizing Your Site with Tags

Title Tag

The title tag is possibly your most important consideration when you try to raise your search-engine rankings for a particular keyword or phrase. Search engines use the text contained within the title tag as a primary factor to determine what the content of a certain web page is about. The text that makes up your title tag is also the clickable link that typically appears on the search-engine result pages when your site appears in the rankings. The title tag text also appears at the top of a web browser when someone is visiting a particular page on your web site.

Limit your title tags to 65 characters or less because most search engines do not display any more than that. Your title tag should be a concise statement summarizing the main point of your content, and should be compelling enough to encourage search-engine users to click the link and visit your site.

To increase relevancy for the keywords or phrases that you have included in your title tags, consider naming your files based on those keyword terms. See the example below (top portion of the WordPress Post Editing box)… do you see where it says “Permalink: http://webseoblogtips.com/keyword-density/”?

The web page file name is the words “keyword-density”, which is also my main keyword phrase for this article. (The below example image that shows the words “Keyword Density – Blog Tips for SEO Page Rank!“, is not to be mistaken for the title tag. This would be the description of your page, by WordPress default, wrapped in the “h1″ header tag, which you will learn about below!)


When you link from one page to another on your web site, your link text should be closely related to the title tag of the page linked to. Your title tag must also be unique for each and every page of your web site and should include one or two of your keywords that you want the page to rank for. Due to the ranking influence that the title tag possesses, a search-engine penalty is likely to result if the same title tag is repeated across all pages.

If you are creating your own Static HTML website through software similar to Dreamweaver, then you most likely know how to add this information. Considering that these lessons are based on the WordPress-based site, the story is a little different.

Some WordPress themes have an area for adding a custom title, but not all. If your theme does not have this option, then by default WordPress creates the title tag from the Heading Title of your article. If the title to your article happens to be longer than 65 characters like a few of mine, then your title will be cut off in the search results. The solution to your WordPress Theme based site is further down this lesson, so keep reading.

I have written an article about Title Tags, in which I will also leave the link at the end of this lesson for you to read… this article goes into much greater depth.

Optimize Your Meta Description Tag

You should optimize each and every meta description tag on your web site, because meta description tags are part of the display information that visitors see when your site is listed in the search engines.

The meta description tag contains a brief description of what your web page is about, and although not as influential as it once was in the search-engine ranking process. The meta description tag is important because you can use it as a method to deliver your marketing message and entice search-engine visitors to click on your listing versus clicking on your competition’s listing.

Create a few compelling sentences describing your product, services, or web site content, and place them in your meta description tag, not to exceed 160 characters (most search-engines use the maximum of 160 characters in their search results pages). The description should interest the potential visitor and tempt that person to click your search-engine results link.
You may be tempted to replicate the same tag throughout your entire web site, but this practice is likely to hurt your rankings; the major search engines could determine that all your pages are duplicates.

Not all search engines use the meta description tag in the results pages. Google, for example, generates its own description based on the content contained within the particular web page. Whether Google uses meta description tags in its ranking algorithms is not known. Still, you should take advantage of the search-engine spiders that do use the meta description tag in their ranking algorithms. Less-popular but still-significant search engines such as Ask.com, AltaVista, and AllTheWeb still do use the meta description tag in their results.

Optimize Your Meta Keywords Tag

Perhaps the least important factor in optimizing a web site for search-engine rankings is the use of the meta keyword tag. Similar to the meta description tag, the meta keyword tag contains a list of keywords or phrases, separated by commas, that describe the subject matter of a particular web page.

Today, the search engines give little consideration to meta keyword tags. Still, you should not skip implementing this tag on all your web pages. What sort of significance the search engines may place on this tag in the future is impossible to know, and although you are not likely to see an increase in your rankings with today’s ranking algorithms, anything is possible down the road.

In the mid-1990’s, back when search engines were much less sophisticated, the meta keyword tag was used by the search engines to determine what keywords and phrases a web page should rank for. As you can imagine, it did not take long before the meta keyword tag was exploited to obtain search-engine rankings for keywords or phrases that had nothing to do with the actual content of certain pages.

For each page on your web site, generate a short list of no more than ten keywords or phrases and include them in the meta keyword tag. Do not repeat keywords or phrases, and be sure that each web page on your site has a unique meta keyword tag. Again, although you may be tempted to duplicate this tag throughout your site, your rankings could decrease as a result due to duplicate content.

SEOCentro.com offers an invaluable tool to help analyze your meta tags of any of the completed articles on your site.

This tool analyzes every meta tag of a web page and offers suggestions to improve those tags. It will analyze the length and relevancy of your title, description, and keywords meta tags; it also verifies that all the tags are formatted correctly. Incorrectly formatted tags can render your HTML unreadable by the search engines, causing a ranking penalty, and they could prevent a web browser from loading your page correctly, thus rendering it unreadable to human visitors as well.

Try to make sure your meta tags follow the guidelines and suggestions mentioned by the tool. Keep your title, description, and keywords meta tags within the length requirements. This tool can also be used to analyze your competitors’ meta tags if you are curious to see what they have done differently.

This tool also analyzes the size and load time of the page. Pages that are too large or take too long to load can aggravate your visitor and push them out the door.

Your Title, Description and Keywords Tags Solution for WordPress

There is a solution to all your WordPress worries for the Title tag, Description tag, and the Keywords tag… the All in One SEO Pack plug-in. There are other plug-ins available, but this is the one that I use for my blog, and that I would recommend. This plug-in allows you to create your own title tag text and counts the characters as you type showing you if you need to shorten your title tag. It will do the same for your description tag.

Once you have installed the All in One SEO Pack in to your WordPress-based site, and enabled the plug-in, you will have a section to add this information at the bottom of your ‘Edit Post’ page as shown below.

SEO Effects of the Anchor Tag

Choosing appropriate anchor text for both your incoming and outgoing links can play a large role in increasing your search-engine rankings for the terms and keywords your site is targeting. Anchor text is the clickable text attached to a hyperlink. An effective use of anchor text is to describe the content of the page being linked to directly in the anchor text. In order to create anchor text in your WordPress-based site’s content, follow the instructions below.

For the Visual tab in your WordPress Edit Box, highlight the wording that you would like to use for the link, click on the link icon (looks like the ‘infinity’ sign or a flattened number 8 turned on its side), when the ‘insert/edit link’ box opens, paste your hyperlink in to the ‘Link URL’ box, click the ‘Target’ drop-down menu, choose to open link in a new window, or open link in same window, type in a title of the link if you’d like to, then click insert.


For the HTML tab in your WordPress Edit Post box, you will need to highlight the wording that you would like to use for your link, then click on the word “link”, a box will open, then you paste the hyperlink that you want the text to go to in the box, click OK.

 

Below is an example of what the anchor text will look like in the HTML tab of your WordPress Edit Box.

<a href=”http://www.example.com”>Example Anchor Text</a>

When building links to your web page, you should always attempt to acquire links with highly descriptive anchor text. Search engines use anchor text to determine the theme of the page being linked to, and anchor text is an important factor in search engine’s ranking algorithms.
Do not overuse one specific variation of anchor text. The search engines will rank you higher if you include some variety with your terms when using your anchor text selection. If you recall, we discussed keyword variety in the LSI Keyword Research lesson… for a refresher, visit 

 2 – Keywords & Your Web Site! – LSI Keyword Research.

Add Emphasis with Header Tags

You can use HTML header tags to apply significance to keywords or phrases within a web page. Placing a selection of text within a header tag tells the search-engine spiders that the text is of a certain level of importance. Search-engine ranking algorithms place emphasis on text enclosed within header tags when determining where pages should be ranked for these terms. Much like the other tasks of this chapter, the use of header tags is standard practice and should be viewed as a best-practices starting point.

Header tags are arranged in preset levels of importance ranging from <h1>, the most important, to <h6>, the least important. Unless it is modified through other means, text enclosed within an <h1> tag appears larger than its neighboring text on the web page, and text enclosed within an <h6> tag appears smaller.

Header tags can be used anywhere within the <Body> tag of an HTML document, and the appearance of the resulting formatting can be altered with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which is beyond the scope of this training. Their syntax would look similar to this in your Edit Post box, for the HTML tab:

<h1>Text enclosed within a Header 1 Tag</h1>
<h2>Text enclosed within a Header 2 Tag</h2>

Beyond using header tags to highlight text on your pages, you can use them to logically format your content into hierarchal topics and subtopics as shown below.

Losing Sleep Over Poor Sleep Habits?

Your Mattress Could Keep You Awake

Too Firm?

Too Soft?

Choosing the Right Mattress

—————————————————————————-
The heading hierarchy reads like this:
h1 tag: (Page Topic) Losing Sleep Over Poor Sleep Habits?
h2 tag: (Main Topic) Your Mattress Could Keep You Awake
h3 tag: (Sub Topic) Too Firm?
h3 tag: (Sub Topic) Too Soft?
h2 tag: (Main Topic) Choosing the Right Mattress
Beyond using header tags to highlight text on your pages, you can use them to logically format your content into hierarchal topics and subtopics. For example, if you are writing an information page about PPC management, place that key phrase in a header tag like <h1>PPC Management</h1>. If within the same topic there is the subtopic “PPC Management Services”, place that key phrase in a sub-header like <h2>PPC Management Services</h2>.
To choose a header tag in your Edit Post box (Visual tab), you will see the drop-down menu in the upper left corner, marked ‘Format’. All you need to do is similar to creating anchor text… highlight the word that you want to add the tag for, click on the drop-down box and choose which heading format, it’s that easy (to add the header tag in the HTML tab, you would need to do it manually as shown above). See image below!

Do not expect drastic increases in rankings for keywords and phrases highlighted by header tags, but always try to use them wherever appropriate in your web page creation. You are providing a service to both the search engines and your visitors by visually emphasizing the important topics.

Text Modifiers

You can modify text on a web page to emphasize important keywords and phrases to help search engines and human visitors identify the main topic of that page; this can lead to higher rankings for those terms. Besides header tags, you can use other text-modifying tags to place emphasis on certain keywords, phrases, or blocks of text.
These tags included with WordPress are as follows: <B> which will give you the <strong> tag if you look in the HTML version of your Edit box, <I> which will show as the <em> tag in the HTML version, and the <U> that will show as <span style=”text-decoration: underline;”>Underlined Word</span>.
Each tag will also have the closing tag directly after the emphasized word as shown in the examples below. These examples are what the finished word(s) will look like in the HTML Edit Post box:

• <strong>Bold</strong>
• <em>Italicized</em>
• <span style=”text-decoration: underline;”>Underlined</span>

Although it is unlikely that the use of these tags is going to provide any serious boost to your rankings, it is important to understand that search-engine optimization is a cumulative effort, and the use of these practices together is what provides results.

Optimizing the Alt Image Tags

Because search engines cannot accurately read images, you will need to explicitly tell the search engines what your images are about. Although images are not necessarily search-engine friendly, they are a vital part of visitor-friendly design. A vibrant, colorful, image-based web site compels its visitors to stay longer and browse more pages.
As a general rule you should limit the use of images on your web page; if you can say what you want to with text, you should. However, if you use images, you should also use Alt Image Tags.
The Alt image tag is a textual replacement for an image. If for any reason an image cannot be displayed, the Alt image text appears in its place. Rather than just fill your Alt image tags with lists of keywords or phrases, take the time to write a unique relevant, if possible keyword-based, description of the image being described.
Abuse of these tags can lead to a rankings penalty, so be careful when writing your descriptions. Do not repeat the same words over and over again, and never repeat the same Alt image tag more than once unless the image itself is repeated. The search engines read Alt image tags and take that text into consideration when ranking pages, but Alt image text is not an equal substitute for actual text included within the body of the page.

5 - will be covering every aspect of structuring your content properly for people and search engines alike; the lesson will include proper keyword density and the proper writing length for article submission.

– You will be shown the importance of writing compelling headlines to writing in an original voice; a complete keyword-enriched web site makeover if you choose, plus the necessity of pinging your blog for updated content.

Below are the links from this lesson in order of appearance (each link will open a new window or tab to allow you to easily return to this page for more link navigation.)

The Title Tag article mentioned from above: http://seoblogoptimizer.com/title-tags-seo-tips/
SEOCentro.com Meta Analyzer Tool http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html
Here’s the link for the WordPress All in One SEO Pack plug-in http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

3 - The Roles of Links and Linking

How Links Affect SE Optimization

If the word keyword is the word that you hear most often in SEO, then links or linking would be the word that you will hear second-most often. Links have as much, if not more weight with search engine crawlers than keywords do.

A web site without links is like an uncharted island to quote one of my articles. 

This island could be sitting right there in the middle of the ocean, littered with diamonds or plants that grow that can heal disease. It doesn’t matter what this island contains if no one knows it exists. 

Do you see where I am going with this? The same is true of your web site… it doesn’t matter how great the site looks, the information that you provide, or the products or services that you are offering if people can’t find you. This site is as good as the undiscovered island.

Your first purpose of links or linking will be to connect your site with others that are relevant to the information that your site provides. 

Links will provide the method to which traffic to your site is increased… isn’t this the reason that you are playing the SEO game? 

Your desire is to increase the traffic to your site, which in turn increases the number of products that you sell, the number of leads you collect, etc. In short, links lead to increased profit and growth. Of course you’d want to use them on your site.

Snagging Inbound Links

Most of your web sites in cyberspace have links that lead to other web sites.

The links that leave your web site are important, but they are not nearly as important as the links that lead to your site. Links that lead to your site, called inbound links or backlinks, are viewed by search engines as votes for the value of your web site. 

The more inbound links that lead to your site, the more weight the search engine crawlers will give to your site, which in turn equates to better search engine ranking. Anytime that your site is being voted for, you will want to have as many of these votes as possible.

Inbound links are such an important part of a linking strategy that some organization find themselves caught up in the process of learning who is linking back to them. It is a good thing to know where your links are coming from, and one of the places you can gather this information is from a web analytics application.

My suggestion would be to get Google Analytics at the following link

http://www.google.com/analytics/

One of the most effective ways to find potential quality linking partners is to mimic the efforts of your most successful competition. What works for your high ranking competition, can also work for you, and any web page that links to one of your competitors is a prime candidate of yours for linking to your site as well.

Because the number of QUALITY inbound links play such a large role in the Google organic ranking algorithm, you should put together a list of web sites that link to your top performing competitors, focusing on the pages that target the same audience that you intent to target. 

Once you find out where all the links are coming from, you can attempt to acquire links from those sites to yours.

One of the oldest methods for gaining inbound links is to request them. This requires that you study your market to find out who the players involved are. 

Then you contact each one of the sites that you discover and ask them to link to your site. Of course giving them a good reason that benefits them is always a plus. So you are not discouraged, you may put in a large amount of time into requesting links, for a relatively small return on your efforts.

Another great method is to offer articles to companies to freely use as long as they include information at the bottom that credits you and provides a link back to your site.

There are always web sites that are looking for good content to include in their pages.

I will be covering the additional methods to gain those inbound links in your final lesson, 
7 – Getting Unlimited Traffic to Your Site. For now, you need to know how to locate these sites that you can gain links from.The easiest FREE tools available to find your competitions backlinks are the search engines themselves. 

Google and Yahoo provide you with a way to find all the links that are pointing to a particular web page. You can use Google’s link query and Yahoo’s linkdomain query tools to allow you to find the sites that link to any other site.

For the Google link tool, go the 

http://www.google.com/, 

 type “link:yourdomainname.com” in the search box replacing “yourdomainname.com” with the one that you want results for. 

This will return the search results for all the web sites that Google considers relevant links to your web site… see below!


For the Yahoo linkdomain query, go to http://www.yahoo.com/, then in the search box type linkdomain - followed by the web site in which you want results for.

Evaluate Potential Linking Partners

One of the most important factors to consider is the age of the link domain you are trying to acquire a link from. 

Google tends to treat older domains that have been around for several years with more respect than domains registered recently. If you can acquire a link to your page from a domain that was registered in 1995, it is likely to have a greater effect on our organic rankings than a link from a domain that was registered last month.

To find the age of a domain, navigate to      www.domaintools.com, 

enter a domain name in the Whois look up search box, then click search. 

Once your results appear, scroll down the page to see the age of the domain from the Created date.

You should also try to acquire as many links as possible from domains with .edu and .gov top-level domain extensions. The search engines know that these educational and governmental establishments are much less likely to link to low-quality pages than a typical .com or .net domain. If you cannot find any.edu or .gov links to directly link to you, try to find pages that do have a large number of .edu or .gov links and prospect those site owners for a link.

You may want to consider examining other factors when analyzing potential linking partners. Make sure that sites you are trying to acquire links from have incoming links that are relevant to their own content. If so, that site is likely an authoritative and trusted resource for that subject matter.

Also you should acquire links from high traffic pages.

Visit www.alexa.com, click on the link at the top, Site Info. 

Enter the domain name of the potential linking partner into the search box, click on the Search button; then click on the Get Details button when the page appears. The more traffic the site receives, the lower the Alexa number is. Aim for sites with Alexa rankings of less than 100,000.

Creating Outbound Links

The subject of outbound links has often been debated. There are some who worry about leaking PageRank – what (supposedly) happens when you link out to others. No one knows for sure exactly what mix of elements is considered when your page is ranked by a search engine. However, it’s safe to say that if you have only inbound links and no out-bound links, it can’t look good for your site.

The best plan of action is to have a balanced mix of inbound and outbound links. 

Your site visitors will expect to see some links leading to other sites on the web, whether those links are simple resources to help them find what they need, or something else.

You should also have some favorites out there that you find helpful and that you think others will find helpful, called your Blogroll on your blogs sidebar. When you’re creating your outbound links, keep the following guidelines in mind to appease search engine crawlers, because even though the main target for your links should be your site visitors, search engines will pay attention to your links, and your search ranking could be affected by them.

• Keep your links relevant – That doesn’t mean that you can link only to pages that are in the same industry as your own; but if you do link outside your industry, make sure there is some logical reason for sending your visitors in that direction. Search engine crawlers examine the content of links closely, both in the links that are created within text and in the actual URL of a link, as much as in the content of pages that are linked together.
• Be careful who you link to – Don’t link to low quality sites, because some search engines will penalize you for that. If, however you link to high-ranking sites, you’ll gain even more traction with search engines… the outbound links on your sites are under your control, so choose wisely.
• Don’t create pages that contain only links – When search engines see pages that contain nothing but links they read them as spam pages. If you must use a resource page, be sure to include descriptions of each link that you include on the page. Better yet, avoid this practice altogether if there’s any way you can.
• Monitor links and update broken ones – A broken link is worse than not having a link at all. When you link to a page and don’t check back on the links periodically, things could change… companies go out of business, web sites can change or disappear altogether. When the search engine crawler follows the links on your page and finds a broken link, this reflects badly on your site. If the broken link is there for a long time, the search engine could reduce your ranking because it appears that you’re not maintaining your site properly.

Use outbound links where they are relevant and useful to your site visitors and not one time more. When you do use them, take the time to ensure that your links are accurate and connect to the correct page.

A Linking Strategy to Stay Away from… Link Farms

If you’ve ever landed on a page with links ordered neatly around the page, and with little or no text explaining all of the various links, then you’ve landed on a link farm. These sites are collections of links that lead to other web sites, or sometimes to other link farms.
Link farms are not good strategy for improving your search engine rankings. Search engines don’t like link farms because they offer no information that’s of any value to the people who perform searches. For that reason, link farms are usually delisted as soon as they’re discovered.

Using Internal Links

Internal links are those that lead people from one page to another within your web site. This is different from the navigational structure. Internal links are more natural links that occur in the text on your web pages.
Without a good internal linking strategy, you run the risk of not having your site properly crawled by the search engine spiders. You should have links that lead from part of your content to another important element on your site (such as an archived article or news clipping), so site visitors find that moving through the information they’re examining on your site is a natural process that takes place without too much difficulty or thought.

The most effective methods of internal linking are as follows:

• Inline Keyword Text links – These are links that you can use anchor tags and keywords to link to other pages on your site (anchor tags will be discussed in the next lesson, Lesson # 4 – Optimizing Your Site with Tags!). Use keywords for your text links as often as possible: (Text is displayed as a link instead of the URL for the link being displayed.) Using the phrase Click Here won’t gain you any leverage with a search engine crawler. Using a link that reads Rhino Bicycles, when that phrase is one of your key phrases will help improve your search engine ranking as long as the link leads to a page that truly is about Rhino bicycles.
• Links within the footers of your pages – Footer links are a common linking strategy that usually takes visitors to some element of the site’s administrative functions. See below!

Whatever you do with the navigational structure of your web site, always avoid using back and forward buttons. Not only are these buttons frustrating for users who want more options than just forward and back, they’re also a red flag for search crawlers that your site may not be user-friendly. Take the time to build a navigational structure that gives your visitors the options they want for moving around your page and finding the information they need.

Remember the Basics When Link Building

It is important to remember that quantity is not nearly as important as quality while you build your link structure. Your linking strategy will be far more successful if you create links (both inbound and outbound) that are of high quality. When you link to other sites from yours, make sure that their site is more popular than your own. The same goes for inbound links… try to make sure that the links pointing to your site from another’s site is more popular than your own. Link building will be an ongoing process that you’ll work at for the lifetime of your web site.

Next lesson: Lesson # 4 – Optimizing Your Site with Tags!

– Lesson # 4 Will be Covering the Title tag, Description tag, Keywords tag, Anchor tag, Header tags (h1, h2, h3), Text Modifiers, and the Image Alt tag… Don’t Miss It!

Below are the links from this lesson in order of appearance (each link will open a new window or tab to allow you to easily return to this page for more link navigation.)

Google analytics http://www.google.com/analytics/

Google & Yahoo Link Queries (find the sites that are linking to yours or any other site.)

Go to http://www.google.com/, then in the search box type “link:” followed by the web site in which you want results for.
Go to http://www.yahoo.com/, then in the search box type “linkdomain:” followed by the web site in which you want results for.
To find the age of a domain, navigate to http://www.domaintools.com/

Alexa for Traffic Rankings

Visit www.alexa.com, click the link “Site Info” at the top of the page, enter the domain name of the potential linking partner into the search box, click the Search button, then the Details button on the next page.

UA-37443639-1

2 - Keywords and Your Web Site

Keyword… that is the term you hear associated with search engine optimization all the time. In fact, it’s very rare that you hear anything about SEO in which keywords aren’t involved in some way.

There was a time when the keywords that were used to rank a page were one of the most important factors in obtaining a high-quality score.

Keywords are still vitally important in web page ranking. However, they’re just one of dozens of elements that are taken into consideration.

What are Keywords

Keywords are the words or phrases that potential visitors enter into a search engine's Search box to find a web site that is related to a particular subject. Simply put, keywords are the words that are used to catalog, index and find your web site.

Before you take the plunge directly into the keyword search tools, spend some time analyzing your target market… you will need to learn as much as you can about your potential customers and your competition, so you can choose the proper keywords for your site.

Additionally, for each page on your site, you will create a list of keywords or keyword phrases that you will write into your site's content... these keywords or phrases will also be placed into your keywords tag (tags will be covered in  4 - Optimizing Your Site with Tags. The keywords or keyword phrases that you implement into your content will be unique to each page of your site that you produce.

Placing Right Keywords for Your Site

Your chosen keywords and phrases will play a large role in determining where you will land in the search rankings. Placing these keywords in the content you write will make the difference between your page being found in cyberspace or not.

Selecting the proper keywords for your site may mean the difference between not being found anywhere on the web, or being the first site that users click on when performing a search. Let’s start by looking at the two types of keywords… brand keywords and generic keywords.

Brand Keywords are keywords associated with your brand. If you don’t use the keywords contained in your business name, business description, and specific category of business, you’re missing out.

Generic Keywords are all the other keywords that are not directly associated with your company brand. Example, if your web site, TeenFashions.com sells teen clothing, then keywords such as clothing, tank tops, cargo pants, and bathing suits might be generic keywords that you could use on your site.

You should also know that there are two categories of keywords… keywords or phrases that you pay a fee to use (called pay-per-click), and naturally occurring keywords that work for you without the need to pay someone to ensure they appear in search results (called organic keywords).

Broad Keywords & Phrases, Compared to Specific Keyword Phrases

As you begin considering the keywords that you’ll use on your site, the best place to start brainstorming is with keywords that apply to your business. Every industry has its own set of buzzwords that people think of when they think about the products or services related to their business.

Start your brainstorming session with words and phrases that are broad in scope, even if they may not bring great search results. Then narrow your selections to more specific words and phrases, which will bring highly targeted traffic to your site. 

Below is an example

Broad Keywords and Phrases

• Knives
• Indian Knives
• Damascus Knives

Specific Keyword Phrases

• Hunting Knives
• American Indian Knives
• Vintage Damascus Knives

Now that you have the idea about broad compared to specific keyword phrases, let’s move on.

Below is my favorite keyword research tool

 The Google Keyword Suggestion Tool,  

at   -   https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Type the keyword or keyword phrases in the box, click search and watch the results. As mentioned above, you will want to choose the most specific keyword phrases and their synonyms that you will be writing in your content or article.

Another tool for you to check out is Wordtracker Keyword Suggestion Tool

at   -  http://www.wordtracker.com

Wordtracker offers a useful keyword suggestion tool that comes in free or subscription-fee versions. Wordtracker provides you with a list of related keywords and the estimated search volume for each keyword. Wordtracker collects search volume data from two search engines, dogpile.com and metacrawler.com.

Given the large size of the Wordtracker database, search volume estimates have proven to be fairly reliable and should provide you with a good idea of the kind of volume a given keyword generates across various search engines. Wordtracker breaks search volume estimates down into daily figures, as opposed to monthly numbers the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool provides.

Stemming Keywords

Keyword stemming is the growth of one related word from another, using suffixes and prefixes. 

It can also include the addition of words on either side to extend the keywords scope. A major factor in search engine optimization is the hunt for relevant keywords that are under optimized by competitors, yet frequently used by searchers.

For example, if you’ve chosen “book flight” for your travel web site, then the stemmed keywords for that phrase might be as follows:

• Booking flights
• Book flights
• Pre-book flights
• Re-book flights
• Re-booking flights
• Pre-booking flights
• Re-booked flights

There has been some discussion about the effectiveness of keyword stemming in your web site content. The consensus states that stemming is a good method to boost the number of times that you can use a keyword or keyword phrase on any given page.

Remember that rankings are achieved through a complex combination of factors from the algorithms that crawl your site. It goes back to what I said before… create pages for the user, not search engines. These are guidelines, but they will help you create a standard for how you use your keywords.

Using Semantic Indexing (LSI) Keyword Research

Semantic Indexing allows the search engines to determine a page’s relevance based upon its subject matter, rather than keyword density.

You can construct your sentences and paragraphs using semantically linked words to help make your pages extremely relevant to your particular search terms; covering as many thematically linked terms as possible helps establish high relevancy and a natural tone within your content.

In the world of organic search, latent semantic content refers to words that are connected thematically to a specific search query. For example: Computer, QuickTime, Mac, iPod, Macintosh, iPad, Mac Computer are all related terms synonymous for Apple Inc.

 There are Google tools available to assist you in finding terms related to your search.

There are Google tools available to assist you in finding terms related to your search.

If you go to        http://www.google.com/

type in the search bar “~apple” (don’t forget the “~” you’ll find next to the keyboard key # 1), even if you are using the new Google instant search, be sure to click the Search button to see the results in BOLD lettering.

 
Let’s take it one step further… with your search word “~apple” still in the search box, click on the link to your left “More search tools”, when the drop-down menu opens, scroll down and click on the “Related searches” link to come up with possible additional words at the top of the page.

For the word Apple, I did not see many additional synonyms that could be used, but when I typed in the words “~301 redirect”, I received many more usable phrases after I clicked on the Related Searches link, but not before. I guess it can vary with each word or phrase.

Another great source for semantic keyword research can be found at  -

www.Quintura.com/ 

Navigate to quintura.com, type in the word “Apple” and on the search results page. Position your mouse over the word iPod in the keyword cloud. Notice the terms that appear such as nano and itunes? These terms are related to the term iPod.

 Domain Name Tips

These are tips for the person thinking of re-naming their site, or just starting out. The question of what to name a web site is always a big one. When selecting a name, most people think in terms of their business name, or a word or phrase that has meaning for them. What they don’t consider is how that name will work for the site’s SEO. 

Does the name have anything at all to do with the site, or is it completely unrelated?

Have you ever wondered why a company might be willing to pay millions of dollars for a domain name? The domain name business.com was purchased for $7.5 million in 1999 and was recently thought to be valued at more than $300 million today. Casino.com went for $5.5 million and worldwideweb.com sold for $3.5 million.

Where SEO is concerned, the name of your web site is as important as many of the other SEO elements that you need to consider. 

Using a domain name containing a keyword from your content usually improves your site ranking.

A few things to keep in mind when you’re determining your domain name.
 




          1 - Keep the name as short as possible. Too many characters in a name mean increased potential for misspellings. It also means that your site address will be much harder for users to remember unless it’s something really startling.

          2 - Avoid dashes, underscores, and other meaningless characters. If the domain name that you want is taken, don’t just add a random number or piece of punctuation to the name in order to “get close”. Close doesn’t count here. Instead, try to find another word that’s relevant and possibly included in the list of keywords you’ll be using.

           3 - Opt for .com name whenever possible. There are a lot of domain extensions to  choose from, such as info, biz, us, tv, etc., but if the .com version of your chosen domain name is available, that’s always the best choice. Users tend to think in terms of .com and any other extension will be harder for them to remember. .Com names also tend to receive higher rankings in search engines than web sites using other extensions.


My favorite web site to search for available domain names is GoDaddy.com at the following address   

http://www.godaddy.com/.

If you find that the domain name is taken, you can click on the “Smart Search” link that is located directly below the search box with the words “Search for another domain” (scroll down just a little bit on the GoDaddy.com page to see the box).

If you found that the perfect domain name that you want is unavailable, Wordoid.com is another great web site to help you figure out some additional domain names from the one you like so much… 

you can check it out at       http://wordoid.com/

Again, it’s important to realize that domain naming is only one facet of SEO strategy. 

It won’t make or break your SEO, but it can have some impact. 

Therefore, take the time to think about the name you plan to register for your site and then how you plan to structure your URL’s as your web site grows.

Keyword Research Tools

The Google Keyword Suggestion Tool, found at

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Wordtracker Keyword Suggestion Tool located at

http://www.wordtracker.com/

A great source for latent semantic keyword research can be found at 

http://www.quintura.com/

Domain Name Tips

 GoDaddy for domain name search  

http://www.godaddy.com/

Wordoid for additional ideas for domain names  

http://wordoid.com/