Internet Marketing and eCommerce Expert – Nigel Burke's Blog

Your website can rank higher by simply knowing what elements Google and other search engines look at when indexing your page. When you are aware of these elements, you can make minor modifications to your website to produce a better ranking.

This is information that your SEO expert does not want you to know. SEO experts charge thousands of dollars to apply this to your website.

1. URL – The URL is the web address. You can name the page with the targeted keywords.
   Action – Name your pages accordingly.
   Example – http://yourdomain.com.au/keyword.html
    
2. Links – The links in the page should be related to the targeted keywords. These are just like references and by reading the references, you should be able to work out what the original page is about.
   Action – Name your links so they are related to the targeted keywords.
   Example – <a href=”apr.com.au”>Australian Produce Report</a>
    
3. The title tag – Do not simply place your business name here. Search engines rank the first words as the most important keywords for your site.
   Action – Place the most important keywords first and then your business name.
   Example – <title>keywords | page name | Business name</title>
    
4. The description tag – This does not have as much weight as it used to have but it is still important. Many search engines still look at this for keywords and even Google may use it as the description for your page in it’s search results.
   Action – Imagine that your visitor has not seen the page and write a good description about what the page is about.
   Example – <meta name=”description” content=”a great description of the page”>
    
5. The keywords tag – Search engines may not put much weight on to the specified keywords but it is still good to include it because every bit helps.
   Action – Enter a list of the most important keyworkds into this tag.
   Example – <meta name=”keywords” content=”a list of great keywords”>
    
6. The heading tags – Search engines look at the heading tags throughout your document and define what the page is about. Many websites make the mistake of not using the heading tags at all so the text looks like a long blurb to a search engine.
   Action – Using heading tags to break up your text into headings and subheadings using the search engine recognised way.
   Example – <h1>Big heading</h1> … text … <h2>Sub heading here</h2> … more text.
    
7. Bold text – Does your site use bold text? Using bolding on your most important keywords in your text. This will make it easier for a human reader and search engine bot to understand it – but make sure that it still looks good. Afterall, you need to make pages that humans can read and not pages that are simply only optimized and readable by search engine robots.
   Action – Use bolding for your most important keywords in your content
    
8. Text – Your chosen keywords should be the main discussion points on this page. If you have chosen a keyword but have not mentioned it in the content, should you be really targeting that keyword or maybe you need to add more content so you include the keywords.
   Action – Check that your target keywords are aligned with the content.
    
9. Alt text – Do your images utilize the image description element? If you load a web page without images, you should be able to make out what the images are about using the image description information. Search engines only read text and not images. The alt image value appears when you rest a mouse on an image.
   Action – Describe every image on the page and add your targeted keywords where you can. Remember that Braille readers and speech synthesizers use the alt text value so do not confuse these readers.
    

How could we forget these basic rules?
When making a web page, we often think about the marketing and the selling perspective of the page. We often forget that search engine robots need to read these pages too. On the other hand, we need to create pages that humans can understand as well.

Search engines try and replicate how a human would read a page but sometimes, they need a helping hand. By implementing these elements correctly on all your web pages means that search engines will recognise the content and targeted keywords more easily.

Conclusion
You now know how to optimize your on-page elements for your website. Now go update your website with your new found knowledge!

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