How To Make Online Money

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) falls into two categories: on-page and off-page. Off-page SEO deals with getting the proper in-bound links to your page, sitemaps, etc. This article is focused on On-Page SEO.

In order to achieve the best rankings possible within the search engines, it helps to know what the SEs value on a page. In other words, how do they know how closely your page is related to a set of keywords?

To get the best results, make sure that the keyword you are targeting for that page appears:

• In the title
• In the keywords
• In the description
• Within an <h1> header tag
• Bolded somewhere on the page
• Italicized somewhere on the page
• In the first 25 words of the content
• In the last 25 words of the content
• in about 2-3% of the content (keyword density – ie: for every 100 words, 2 of them should be your keywords)
• in the ALT tags of your images
• contained within your URL (very important!)

Along with those Do’s, there are a few Don’t's:

• Don’t go so overboard that it makes your pages look crazy or ugly.
• Don’t keyword stuff. Repeating the keyword in a non-grammar-friendly way will be detected by the SEs and they’ll lower your ranking.

As a special note: making sure that the keyword appears in your URL is not difficult.  The URLs are weighted heavily in determining the relevance of a page to a keyword.  If the keyword appears in the Domain Name, it gets weighted even more heavily.  So a URL like “www.mower-blades.com/200805/mower-blade-sharpening” will get a good score relevant to the keyword “mower blade”.  “www.sharp-cut.com/accessories” will not get as good a score, even if its content is relevant.

BTW – This is why blogging is such an easy way to build good-ranking pages…each article you post gets the title put in the title, usually an <h1> tag, and in the URL automatically.  So just by writing a blog post (especially with WordPress properly configured and the SEO plugin), you are creating SE Optimized pages.

Most importantly, make sure that the content on your page is actually relevant to the keywords you are targeting. If you keep the VISITORS in mind, but tweak the page with the tips in the list above, you’ll be on your way to a SE Optimized page.