Chris Boswell ­ SEO Expert Marketer Internet Marketing Tips -…

Chris Boswell ­ SEO Expert Marketer


      Internet Marketing Tips - Onsite Search Engine
                       Optimisation

In the competitive world of online marketing, link building counts for everything
these days. Or so we are told to believe when we read all the information available on
SEO websites and blogs. Content is no longer king and link building is everything.

Whilst there is a lot of truth in this, and building up inbound links to your website is
incredibly significant when it comes to the overall success of your online marketing
campaign, there is still a lot you can do to improve your chances by optimising your
website carefully and thoroughly onsite in the content and html code of your web site.

First of all you need content, and as much as is possible on every page. Search
engines read words, and without them you are lost. Words are the building blocks you
can use and manipulate to build up the strength and quality of your onsite
optimisation work. Remember as well, that every page of your website is a potential
landing page and deserves as much attention and quality content as possible.

Secondly, you need internal links. Internal links within your website aren't worth as
much as external inbound links, but they do count for a lot. Internal links will not
only help search engines to navigate your site they will also allow them to associate
the keywords in your link text with the web pages that they link to. This is important
since it helps count towards the relevance of your web page.

Once that we have content and we have links we are ready to build up the quality of
our onsite search engine optimisation. There is one caveat here. While in this article I
do cover about 98% of what you need to achieve formidable results in your onsite
search engine optimisation, I do leave out a few pieces of proprietary information. As
an SEO who earns his living from this sort of thing I have to leave something out
right, otherwise I would have to look for another job.


Starting at the top of the HTML source code we will begin by looking at metadata




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Chris Boswell ­ SEO Expert Marketer



                 Search Engine Marketing and Metadata


 TAG

The TITLE tag is an essential tag for every web page.

   ·   Ideally the Title Tag should have no more than 10 keywords in it. You can
       stretch it to 12 or 14 if you are stuck, but do not exceed this.
   ·   The title tag should have keywords and phrases in there which are relevant to
       the web page you are describing.
   ·   The first words in the title tag matter most, so if you have to put your company
       name in there leave it to the end.
   ·   Every title tag should be different. It is describing the web page, not the web
       site.
   ·   Do not populate the title tag with keywords that are not used on your web
       page.



Meta Description:
The search engines are looking for relevancy here, so if you don't say it on your web
page then do not, under any circumstances, say it in your Meta Description.

I frequently read online that the meta description doesn't matter any more, or that if it
does matter, it only matters because sometimes search engines use the meta
description for the description they provide in the SERPs (Search Engine Results
Pages). This is nonsense. Search engines are looking at more than just keywords or
content for their results when they look at your Meta Description, so include it and be
HONEST!



Meta Keyword:

It is very tempting to squeeze as many keywords in here as possible, but this can be a
grave mistake. You will already start to lose some edge if you include more than 10
comma separated key phrases in here. So, you have been warned ­ no more than 10.
Also make sure that these key phrases are the ten most important and contextual
phrases or words used on your web page. Do not use words which do not appear on
your web page, and do not repeat individual words more than three times. Do not put
your company name in here, it is a wasted word.


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Chris Boswell ­ SEO Expert Marketer



Meta Language:


Being specific here can really help the search engine robots out when they are trying
to decide upon which data centre you belong to. This can have real benefits, for
instance, if you have a .com domain name but your primary market is in the UK. The
search engine robots have to know to put you in the UK data centre so that your
results get displayed in the Google UK results as well as the Google Web results.
Without a .co.uk domain name, the robots are deprived of one of the best means they
have of making this decision, and getting the meta language right can really help them
when making their evaluation.




If you are using a content management system which doesn't allow you to edit this bit
of meta data, then another good way to provide this bit of information is in the HTML
code within the body of your web page. E.g.


some text



Character Encoding:
Remember to declare which character encoding you are using. E.g. UTF-8 or ISO-
8859-1. It gives search engines further relevant information about the language and
regional dialect of your web site, and therefore important information about your
geographical location and potential market place. This information contributes
towards the decision about which data centres your website ought to be included
upon. e.g.







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Chris Boswell ­ SEO Expert Marketer

        HTML Code and the Body of the HTML Document



Internal Links

Internal links are incredibly important when it comes to your over all success at using
onsite search engine optimisation to market your website on the Internet. Links allow
you to indicate to the search engines important contextual information about the web
pages you are linking to, so the more links the better and the more keywords and key
phrases that you have linked the better.


Look for as many opportunities as you can within a webpage for linking to other
pages on your website. The following are some of the linking opportunities you
might consider.

Text menus: It's obvious this one, but the more menu items the better.

Image menus: image menus don't count for as much as text menus, but if you have
to use them, make sure that you don't forget to populate the title attribute, since this is
your only opportunity to get keywords across.

Bottom text menus: add an additional text menu to the bottom of your web page.
This is an excellent opportunity to double up on links and linked terms. Try to vary
the linked terms used in your main menu if possible.

Images: link the images on your web page, and don't forget to include the title
attribute to describe the link. Remember also that image links aren't great for
providing information to your visitors about where the link goes, so make sure you
provide other text links to the web page, that are clear and easy to navigate.

Links from text within paragraphs: search engines love these, so look for
opportunities within the content of your webpage to link to other pages on your
website.

List links: Group relevant web pages together in link lists to provide an extra
navigation option. Search engines like lists, because they provide highly contextual
information in a concise way.


Lastly remember, that both the link text and the title attribute are important places to
get your descriptive keywords in. Be imaginative and creative, and vary your
link text if you link to the same place more than once.




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Chris Boswell ­ SEO Expert Marketer

E.g.

internet marketing resources

internet marketing resources


Harness all of these internal linking opportunities and you are well on your way to
success.


Content:
As I already mentioned, you need substantial and substantive content on your web
pages in order to make a decent go of onsite optimisation. While you should lavish
attention on your main keywords, you should also think about keyword variation.
Include alternative ways of describing your subject or products and services, using
terms for which there might be less competition and probably also less people
searching. It will be easier to rank for these, and because they are often looser than the
core keywords in terms of word length, word order and so forth, it is easier to get
many more of them in, so over all they contribute a fair bit to the number of visitors
they actually generate. This is known as the long tail principle.

   .

 and 

The Strong and Em tags are the equivalent of the bold and italic formatting tags. The
difference is that  and  only control the appearance of the text they enclose.
The  and  tags also have meaning. They are semantic tags which tell
the search engine robots that the text included within them is important. Now we have
looked at these basic semantic tags and understand the principle let's take a look at
some more important ones.



The  Tag

There is a strong tendency among web designers to create headings and subheadings
for web pages by nesting them in low level semantic tags or even non-semantic tags
like div, span or td and simply formatting them with CSS to look like headings. This
is a very bad idea since it prevents the search engine bots from knowing that highly
important text is contained therein. It sounds obvious, but it needs saying, the top or
first level heading should appear in an  tag and subheadings (the more the


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Chris Boswell ­ SEO Expert Marketer

better), should be given in  tags. This way the search engine robots can readily
identify the most important keywords on a page and assign them their appropriate
importance.

Similarly, if you have headings, subheadings or even paragraphs which contain none
of your keywords, you can demote them by using lower level tags and formatting
them with CSS so that they look okay, but aren't giving out the wrong signals to the
search engines. Promote your important keywords and demote the irrelevant ones.

I could say much more about semantic markup here, but once you've got the core
principles behind it you should be able to develop and refine your techniques yourself.



Images and the Alt Attribute

When including images there are couple of things you can do to promote the search
engine visibility of your web page. The first is the name you give to the image. If the
image is related to your content then it will presumably be also related to your
keywords so get them in the file name of the image. Secondly, use the alt attribute to
describe the image and get relevant key phrases in their as well while describing the
image. Don't spam here and keep it relatively short. Also remember that what you do
here contributes not only to the overall relevancy of your web page, it might also
affect how the image is catalogued in Google Images. You should make sure every
image uses the alt attribute and that it is filled in. Your overall SEO score will be
slightly lower for every one you miss, so you are not only improving your chances by
getting these filled in, you are also preventing yourself from being marked down.


Keywords and Filenames

   When naming your html files, choose carefully. The search engines look at these
   for information upon what a webpage is about, so try to be as descriptive as
   possible.

   Be warned though, if your website is already live and has been indexed by the
   major search engines, do not make the mistake of changing files names then. This
   strategy is best used either when building a website from the ground up or
   when adding new web pages to your website.


SEO and Localisation

   Ensure that your content is properly localised for the market you are targeting and
   the special conventions used within that market. E.g.


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Chris Boswell ­ SEO Expert Marketer


   For the USA:

   Search engine optimization


   For Australia and the UK:

   Search engine optimization


   Perhaps even more important for localisation is the inclusion of place names
   within your content.

   If you are only trading locally then get a list in of the areas you cover, preferably
   on every page. Do not spam here, keep the list down to a minimum and in order to
   ensure that these keywords count, link them in. Linking the place names will also
   show the search engines that this is a menu list rather than keyword stuffing.


   SEO and Website Accessibility
   There are lots of disparaging comments made online about website accessibility,
   such as that its really not worth the bother, why should web designers be forced to
   work to these standards, and why should they care about catering for those few
   visitors who may have special requirements when reading web site content owing
   to cognitive or physical conditions. Aside from the fact that such commentators
   are callous, unethical and unconcerned with standards compliant web design, they
   are also missing a search engine marketing opportunity. As I have said, SEO is all
   about providing information in a detailed, focussed and comprehensive way, about
   the attention to detail and granularity you put into your campaign.

   Accessibility features included in the HTML lexicon are great ways of building up
   your keyword relevancy a little, and of getting the fine detail covered. They are
   not big hitters in terms of what they will do for your search engine results;
   however, onsite SEO is about getting lots of details covered and using lots of
   techniques to promote yourself, that when combined have a positive impact upon
   your success.

   So let's have a look at some of the accessibility features of HTML:


   The alt attribute: this is the alternative text used to describe an image and
   provides those visitors using text-to-speech software or text-only browsers with a
   textual description of an image.




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Chris Boswell ­ SEO Expert Marketer

   The alt attribute is also considered important by the search engines. Forget to
   include alt attributes and fill them all in, and Google will mark you down. So, this
   is not only an opportunity to get some keywords in, your over all SEO score will
   also go down if you don't.

   The summary attribute: This is the attribute used in the table tag to give a
   textual overview of the information provided in a table

   The acronym tag: The acronym tag allows you to provide the full length text for
   an acronym or initialism, and is a great little way to double up your keywords. For
   example:

   SEO


See what I mean.



If you would like to learn more about using onsite search engine optimisation to help
market your web site on the Internet, I run onsite SEO training consultancies via
telephone and email charged at 350.00 GBP. Email cb@foursquareinnovations.co.uk.

For internet marketing campaigns please contact us for a quotation: Email
cb@foursquareinnovations.co.uk


Author's resources:

http://www.foursquareinnovations.co.uk
http://seo-expert-marketing.blogspot.com/



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