Optimizing your web pages is easy if you followed the First Simple Rule of Website Promotion and start with a keyword strategy. In this step you will put your keywords where they’ll have the most impact on your page.
Optimizing your web pages will be easier if your web site is a WordPress web site and you use a WordPress plugin to help you place your keywords where they’ll pack a punch. Otherwise, you will need to learn some HTML (which I’m not going to cover in this post).
Optimize Your Web Pages at Keyword “Hot Spots”
Here’s list of the places where your keywords need to show up:
The page title (or post title for a blog post). Make sure your search term shows up in the first 65 characters of your title.
The keywords META tag. Not as important as other keyword “hot spots” so don’t waste time worrying and fussing over this.
The description META tag. Write a description for every page and every blog post using the first 10 words or so to attract visitors and working in keywords where it makes sense. Keep the number of characters to 160 or less.
Headings and sub-headings. Use your core terms and variations in your headings and sub-headings (H1, H2, H3…) on your page.
Text of links. Try to work your keywords into the text of links. Link to another page (or post) on your site where you have used the same keyword phrase. (If your site is a WordPress site, there are another couple of plugins that will help with this optimization step.)
In the body of your text. Work your keywords and variations in where they make sense. Make sure to target searchers by using a lot of different variations of your core terms, along with modifiers, when you write your web pages and blog posts.
Shopping cart product pages. Do a thorough job of writing copy for your product pages and product descriptions to draw a lot of traffic from search engines.
Discussion forums/blog comments/user reviews. These additions to your web site will generate a lot of content ( and your visitors do the work). This content can be used to bring links into your site, send anchor text to your other pages and bring visitors in form search engine results.
Optimize Your Web Pages with WordPress Plugins
Our web site is a WordPress web site and we’ve used a couple of different plugins to help us with search engine optimization. The granddaddy of SEO plugins is All in One SEO. This plugin has a free version and if you know your way around WordPress, you know how to search for and install a new plugin. All in One SEO is easy to configure and will install a widget (user screen) below or to the side of your page editor that looks like this:
Filling in the All in One SEO form places your keywords into the code for your page without you needing to know your way around HTML and web pages. Using this plugin makes getting your keywords into the Page Title, Keywords META and Description META a breeze. More information about All in One SEO — click here.
We have recently opted to switch to Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin which has more features. If you are past the beginning level of optimizing your web pages and blog posts, you might want to check out this plugin. Take a look at the features and get started here to optimize your web pages at Yoast’s web site.
Some Recommended SEO Reading:
Search Engine Optimization Guide by Jeremy Palmer. See especially this part, Optimize Your Website and Pages.
Search Engine Optimization Fast Start by Dan Thies. See especially – Chapter 5: Optimizing Web Pages (Step Three).
CopyBlogger’s SEO Made Simple guide: How to Create Compelling Copy that Ranks Well in Search Engines.
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