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Creating SEO-friendly Pages

Starting to notice your website getting a bit thin on content? Before you start pounding on your keyboard, you may want to consider sprinkling some SEO into your content. If you’re not sure how to go about it, here are some tips to consider when creating optimized web pages:

Make sure you have a clear idea what keywords to optimize for. If you're unsure which keywords to use, do keyword research to get an idea what keywords are competitive (translation: difficult to rank) and what your long-tail keywords might be (translation: what keywords are easier to rank, but not as popular).

Once you have your keywords, design your pages accordingly. Optimize one keyword per page. You should also put keywords in navigational links because they’re important to search engine eyes. Create static header and footer navigation links. Make sure that links are text, not images, so that they can be read by Googlebot. Implement bread crumbs for increasing website navigation structure (Ex. Home >> Products >> Lumber).

Make sure that your meta descriptions are unique for every page and come with targeted keywords. Do not stuff your meta descriptions with keywords. Write a compelling description that's relevant and contains all the information you want your audience to know about your page. Remember that whatever you put in the meta description will be displayed by Google in its results page so make it count.

Add keywords in your headlines. The first word is of the highest importance, with the second word coming in as the second most important and so forth. While you're at it, make sure that all your headlines and sub-headlines are tagged as H1 and H2 respectively. Add a keyword as close to the beginning of the Title tag as possible. Also, keep your Title tag at 70 or less characters to fit Google's character limit for SERPs.

Search engine crawlers can't "see" images. Just because you have a picture of a great-looking power tool doesn't mean the crawlers will know that it's a power tool. Label your images accordingly using the ALT tag. You can also utilize the IMG tag. Make sure your all images - including your site logo - contain a targeted keyword.

Pay special attention to your page's content. Having content that's relevant to your targeted keyword is vital to getting a high page rank. It's equally important as well for your page to have REAL content. This means providing information that is useful and targeted to actual people, not robots. Lastly, since search engines also recognize bold text, it would be a good idea to emphasize your keywords by using the "strong" or "b" HTML tags.

Avoid keyword stuffing. Remember, people will read what you wrote. If your content consists mainly of keywords, it won't make sense and will leave an impression on your visitors that you're just trying to draw in web traffic.

In conclusion, Search Engine Optimization doesn't start and stop at the page level. You have to look at your entire website and make sure that you have decent on-page optimization. Otherwise, all that effort you put in to make a great content-filled page might not reach your intended audience.