How many sales do you lose through poor SEO
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1.3 Optimising web pages – an introduction
In order to introduce you to the methods explored later in this course, the following material is a basic primer to optimising your site. In later units of this course, we will take a more in-depth look at the techniques used by SEO professionals.
For convenience, we will divide this primer into two parts. Firstly we will look at what are known as on-page factors, or the actual code and content of individual web pages. Secondly, we will look at off-page factors, or factors that affect the ranking off individual web pages which are not determined by the actual code of your web pages.
1.3.1 On Page Factors
Bearing in mind that search engines read the textual content of WebPages, it is particularly important that we optimise this content to ensure maximum visibility for our products and services.
Every web page has a number of ‘hotspots’ or points that are considered particularly important by search engines when they try to determine the relevance of that page in relation to a search query. These are as follows:
- The Title tags
The text which appears between the HTML title tags, i.e.: <title>YOUR KEYPHRASES HERE</title>
- The Meta tags
The text that appears between the tags:
<meta name="description" content=" YOUR PAGE DISCRIPTION HERE " />
<meta name="keywords" content="YOUR KEYWORDS HERE" />
- Headings
The text that appears between your heading tags, particularly your first heading i.e.
<h1>YOUR KEYWORDS HERE</h1>
- Page content
The actual text which appears on your WebPages, or page copy. Your pages should contain a substantial amount of text and this text should be keyword rich without spamming the search engine by repeating the same phrases over and over again. The secret of SEO copywriting is to make your page content keyword rich while ensuring that it is still written in a simple, flowing and informative style that users can understand, i.e. plain English.
When optimising web pages, the text within all these areas should contain the keywords that you aim to make your site rank for. This is the key to optimising on-page factors.
In general, then, your pages should aim to distribute your keyphrases throughout these key areas in order to increase the perceived relevance of those pages for your keyphrases.
Note. This should not be confused with Keyword density which is simply a measure, by percentage, of the times that your keywords appear in relation to the other text on your web page. The more your keywords appear on your page, the higher the keyword density for that page.
We will show you more about researching and deploying keyphrases later in this course.
1.3.2 Off-page factors
On-page factors are easy for the user to manipulate, as all you have to do is access the code on your web pages and make it appear more relevant for the keyphrases you wish to rank for. One unfortunate aspect of this, however, is that (if recent experience of the web is anything to go by) it can easily tempt people to adopt unethical practices, such as keyword spamming or attempts to make pages rank for terms which they are not really relevant for.
As a way of getting round the problems caused by unethical manipulation of on-page factors, search engines now take off-page factors into account when determining the ranking of web pages in search engine results.
Off-page factors, refer to factors that are, to a large extent, outside the control of the individual webmaster. The most important of these are external links. External links are the links on a different domain or website that point to your website. Because external links exist on other websites, we can’t manipulate them so easily as we don’t have the access and administrative rights necessary to add links to our own website.
When search engines return results for a search query, they look at not only the relevance of your page for a particular keyphrase, but the importance of your page also. Each major search engine has different ways of measuring this importance, one of the most famous being Google’s PageRank system. Although one search engine differs from another in the manner in which they measure importance, they all take the following into account when doing so:
- Link Popularity
Link Popularity is a measure of your site’s importance based on the number of external links pointing to your site from different domains. Think of a link from another site as a positive review of your site. After all, another webmaster has gone to the bother of linking to you, and for this reason must have found your site valuable or relevant for some reason or another. Search engines take this perception of value into account when ranking sites and factor it into their measure of page importance. The more external links pointing to your site, the more important it is perceived to be by the search engine and the higher it is likely to rank.
- The quality of external links coming to your site
As well as taking the number of external links into account when measuring the importance of a website, search engines also look at the quality of external links. This ‘quality’ is proportionate to the perceived importance of the site that links to you. Because all sites are ranked in terms of importance, as we noted above, search engines give greater weight to external links coming from a site that already has a high page rank or measure of importance.
- Relevance of text links
Another favourable factor that can help search engine ranking is to ensure that the anchor text in the links pointing to your site contains the keywords that your site wishes to rank for. In this way, the anchor text in external links passes added relevancy on to your page.
For example, if your site sold used cars online, the link to your site might read something like the following:
<a href=“http://www.yourdomain.com/”>Buy Used Cars Online</a>
where the text before the close of the anchor tag </a> is the anchor text for your link. For a search query such as ‘buy used cars’, this anchor text reinforces our keywords and passes relevancy on to our pages for that search query.
We will show you how more about working with external links later in this course .
For more information about our Search Engine Optimisation Training Courses contact Syllabus or call +34 693 475 142.