How to Optimize your site with your Googles on

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Now that you’ve researched and found the optimum keywords, knowing where to actually place them on your page is critical.

This is a quick post that came about as I was (am) in the middle of writing a more detailed post on Keyword Research and Optimization and I realised that these particular thoughts deserved their own post. The tips and methodology I talk about here are all related to on page optimization and as such I have to make the quick disclaimer that without using various off page optimization strategies in conjunction with these techniques your efforts to rank will be in vain.

I talk about the importance of Keyword Research and making sure you are effectively optimizing for relevant and more importantly – attainable Keywords, but where is the best place to put these Keywords once you have them? Knowing what Google looks for and how much weight it lends to each ‘tag’ or attribute is critical if you are to take full advantage of the Keywords that you are trying to rank for.

Whether you are building squeeze pages, micro niche sites, or you just wrote a killer piece of sales copy and you want organic eyes all over it, knowing this simple order of things can mean the difference between first and second page ranking, and we know how HUGE a difference that can make. So let’s take a look at How Google Works.

The Order in which Google values your site.

• The Domain Name or URL –This is the first thing Google looks for and the attribute to which it lends the most weight. Having your keyword in your domain is the best thing you can do if you want to rank high for that keyword. This is the strategy employed by niche site marketers like myself since it carries all the attributes required for a niche site, that being powerful (SEO) and restrictive. This is the same reason why it is not the practical solution for most bloggers.

• The Subdomain – This is obviously part of the URL but knowing that it is the second most powerful way to optimize your site for a keyword is helpful information to have. Creating Keyword optimized subdomains is a fantastic strategy especially if you have a niche site that promotes a product with many different models.

• The Page Name – The Page name holds the most value in SEO speak outside of the URL itself. The debate still rages as to whether your headlines should compel Google or the people, but I say

“Write a headline for the readers that’s catchy and just totally awesome and then simply change the permalink to include your keyphrase. Easy, done – debate over. Aaah I love wordpress”

• Page Title – OK so this kind of negates my awesome tip that I so arrogantly tagged with quotes, and also in the world of wordpress this is kind of irrelevant now and has been replaced with the H1 tag, Ok, not replaced but it’s the closest thing to it.

• Header Tags (H1, H2 H3 etc) – This is the first place that bloggers should look if they are wanting to optimize a post for Organic eyes. The ability to add these tags with ease is the main reason why the blogging platform has taken off, but I won’t get into that now. When writing a post or building a site be sure to add your keyword in the heading (H1) tag and also include the keyword in various subheadings (H2,H3 etc)throughout the article.

• Outgoing Links – After Google is done with all the tags it looks to the anchor text, or the words that are hyperlinked on your page. Making sure that you add the keywords to outgoing links can only help your onpage optimization, but make sure that the each destination is anchored with RELEVANT keyword text. If you try to create every outbound link as say ‘cheap car insurance’ you would not only confuse the bejesus out of your visitors, you would also not gain any with Google since they would give no value to the link.

• Images – Well technically it gives the value to the Alt Text Tag since the spider only reads HTML but as they say in America (on my TV): ‘WHATEVER’. When adding images to your posts or pages (which you should do) always label the alternative text with your keyword. This is one instance where the image does not have to have anything to do with your keyword. It probably would help, especially if you wanted traffic from Google’s image search but it is not crucial. I always label every image in a post with the keywords I am trying to ‘get’.

• Anchor Text –The hyperlinked text is known as anchor text and in this instance it refers to your internal links. When creating pages it is highly advisable that you link them together with keyword rich hyperlinks. This is especially prudent if you are blogging as over time your overall rank will increase as hundreds of pages interlink with keyword rich anchor text and relevant content. Point to note, when Google is reading your page it only really lends weight to the top half of the body. Putting the anchor text toward the bottom is a waste of time, the internal link really needs to be in the first few paragraphs to hold the most weight.

• The Body Content – Last and certainly not least is the body text itself. This may seem like an unimportant factor in relation to keyword optimization after everything we have done already, but getting it wrong here can undo all the previous efforts. You need to make sure the content is relevant and that your keywords are placed within the text moderately. As a general rule I like to keep it at 15%, (and that figure again, in English: for an average paragraph like the one you are reading the keyword phrase should not appear more than twice. ) As I mentioned in the previous point, Google tends to lend more weight to the top half of the text body so most of your keywords should be centered around that part of the article

Keyword Density

When Google is looking at your page and indexing it based on what it sees as your chosen keywords (which we have now helped it to see) it is also looking at how often the keywords appear. This is known as keyword density and if you have too much you get ignored as spam. As a general rule, keeping it to between 10 and 15% of the total text is a safe bet. This means that if your key word phrase is 4 words long, it should only appear 3 times at most for every 100 words.

Well there you have it, my supposably short post. Hmmmmmm. But, Follow these basic guidelines when optimizing your page for whatever your keyword phrase may be and you are well on your way to seeing much better results in the search engines.

Stay tuned for the epic post that created this one, as well as my free eBook which will include all of this information and much much more.

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Tagged as: google rank, keyword optimization, keyword research, Keywords, on page SEO