Update you pages the SEO friendly way

Since this blog’s main subjects are standards and web design, SEO or Search Engine Optimizing is an important part of the world wide web too. This article will tell you what and how to optimize your websites for all major search engines.

First I’ll give you some information on offsite and onsite SEO and later on I’ll give you some tip how you could improve your websites.

What is SEO?

My definition of SEO is all the work you do to get your website a high(er) search engine ranking. The difference between offsite and onsite is guessable in my opinion. Onsite is making enhancements to your HTML or PHP web pages. The reason for this is very simple, of course, you want a search engine to recognize the important content (titles, keywords) when crawling your site.

If you didn’t optimize your content and design, the SE will collect insufficient data and this might mean you don’t get the visitors you are looking for. Alright, we continue on the offsite term. Offsite SEO isn’t something you do on the page, but its main goal is to make sure SE’s think your site is an important one.

What is Offsite SEO work?

There are different ways, but the most used is link building. When another ‘big’ website links to yours, SE’s will think your page is important. The more links your website gets, the higher your rank is in the search engines. The best for your website is to do both offsite as onsite SEO.

In this article I’ll show you some smart and easy things you could do to improve your page structure. What I show you here below is what I use myself too. Remember, a browser and search engine isn’t a real person!

What isn’t really a subject on SEO, but what is very important for your webpage, is validating your webpage. You first should make sure your site looks perfect in all browsers. You can validate your xHTML here and your CSS here.

Subjects

- Make good use of keywords
- A good title and site description
- The use of H1’s and H2’s tags
- Add ‘title’ tags to links, ‘alt’ tags to your images

Make good use of keywords

When people search on search engines, they search by keywords. If you don’t have enough keywords or even any at all, they will not find you. Don’t use too many either, SE’s can give your website penalties for that. Always try to blend in your keywords in your content. We’ll talk on that later when we get to subject ‘H1 and H2′.

I’ll give you a code you should use in your webpage. A Meta tag. Use this code to point out ’standard’ keywords for that webpage.

<meta name="keywords" content="accesibility, blogging, blogroll, code snippets, css, html, miscellaneous, news, releases, search engine optimizing, wordpress themes" />

Don’t add to many keywords in the Meta tag. You should use only your most important keywords. This tag should be added between the tags on your webpage.

But the best way to use keywords is to use them in your content. If you are writing a article on Doctypes, you should add keywords like ‘Doctype’ or ‘DTD’ to your content. The search engines will look through your page, and sees a lot of those keywords. This way, search engines can better determine the page is important.

A good title and description

A good title is important too. Let’s say you are looking for web design books, and you search for it through Google’s SE. In this example, result #1 is a website that sells web design books, but the title and description says this:

Title: ‘Writing books, business books for sale now!’
Description: We are selling all different books, from writing books to business.

Result #5 has some other title and description.

Title: ‘Web design books, most subjects available!’ Store name
Description: We are specialists in web design books. We have most books in stock.

What do you think? Do you go for #1 or #5? The most people will go in this case for the one with the better store description and title. This happens all the time on all different subjects, so it is important to have a good title and description.

Usually, I build my titles like this:
Description with my most important keyword or tagline - Sitename

The codes you should use to add a title to your site are these:

<title>Description with keywords - Sitename</title>

Place these codes between the tags.

If you want to add a description to your website too, add the following codes, between your tags too.

<meta name="description" content="Just another WordPress weblog" />

The use of h1 and h2 tags

As you already read, your webpage always should have titles and that your content includes keywords too. But there is another way to let SE’s know what a page is about. I’ll explain why to use h1 or h2 tags. h1 h6 tags are headings. H1 is the biggest, and the smallest. H1 defines the most important heading, in our case, the most important keyword. Using h1’s on your page, you’ll tell search engines this is the ‘content heading’ and one of the most important lines of content.

Therefore h1 should always include your head keyword. H2’s is the most important heading after h1. You should use these in your content as ’subheadings’. The keywords that aren’t your websites top-priority should be included in this heading.

Add ‘titles’ to your links and ‘alts’ to your images

When someone rolls over your link, they will not see any ‘description’. When you roll over an image, you might see an ‘alt’ text. When you want to call for an ‘alt’ on links, you should use ‘titles’. This title is better for your website’s accessibility and is a great for search engines too.

Think of it this way. You are getting an extra free keyword you don’t even see on your webpage! The SE’s won’t recognize it as an extra keyword, but they see it as clearing up what the link is linking to.

If you want to add a title tag to your link, please follow this way:

<a title="SEO lesson" href="http://www.divitodesign.com/wp-admin/seo.html">SEO Lesson</a>

You see you have got 3 times the word SEO now. If this was your keyword, you simply have one extra in the link its ‘title’.

This same trick goes with images. Now, don’t use a ‘title’, but use an ‘alt’ tag instead. When you know roll over an image, it’ll clear up what the image is about to the search engines. And you get your extra keyword(s).

<img src="image/image.jpg" title="title" alt="alt" />

You’ve hit the SEO jackpot three times.

Conclusion

If you haven’t thought of points like these before, study this article. It’ll help you develop your websites as they become visible in the search engines. Remember, you should do offsite SEO work too. Let me know what are your thoughts on this subjects, and possible improvements.

Thanks for reading!