A starters guide to SEO STEP 2 Onsite Optimization

In the previous entry of this series we learned how to choose the right keyword for our niche. In this entry we will learn how to do onsite optimization, onsite optimization is nothing but making our website more search engine friendly. Optimizing your websites should be balanced for both the users and the search engine. Onsite optimization includes inserting your keywords in the key positions and writing new articles or creating new pages to include these keywords.

META Tag:

It is time to observe the code. I opened the code and found that GHUJ.COM doesn’t have the meta tag. Meta tags are considered important in SEO because they tell the search engine about the website. In Meta we have two important fields the Meta keyword and the Meta Description.
Meta Description: Describe in brief about your website, keep it under 30 words.
Meta Keywords: Keep around 10 keywords.
Here is the TAG that I chose for GHUJ.COM

<META name=”description” content=”The Gimp tutorials for newbie’s and advanced users. “>
<meta name=’keywords’ content=’the gimp, tutorial, tutorials, gimp tutorials, gimp download, gimp windows, gimp brushes, gimp mac’>

Check out your competitor’s website for this description, do not copy the exact code instead you can modify it to suit your website.
TITLE Tag:

Titles are very important in SEO, Google searches for keywords in titles. So we must carefully write a page title for our webpage. Do not include more than 3 keywords in the title, else Google may consider it as spamming. Make sure you use the title depending upon the content of the page. Do not use the same title for all the pages.
Keep you code clean
If you have Javascripts in your header I recommend moving them into separate files. When Google bot visits your site and starts the process of indexing it may enter an infinite loop because of some JavaScript so after sometimes it times out and doesn’t index the file it may even blackmark the page so it may not waste it’s time again in the same page. So moving your JavaScripts to a external .js file is a good practice. Validate your pages at http://validator.w3.org/
IMG TAG (Image Tag):

In a previous post I have mentioned how to optimize your images for search engines. I recommend you do a quick read before we proceed.

HEADING TAGS:

Make proper use of the <H> tag, Mark your headings with <H1> Tags . Instead of the <b> tag use <strong>. Use the <p> tag to split up the contents into new paragraphs. To say it straight, if you have used a WYSIWYG editor go through the code all over again and make necessary changes.

Write Quality/Unique Contents:

This is the most important step in SEO, quality/unique contents gets natural links and perform better in search engines. The key is to write more and more pages, the more pages you write the more they are indexed and the more is your chances of being found. Never stop writing articles related to your niche as this keeps the site updated and Google likes fresh contents. This is why SEO experts recommend to start a blog for your website.

Let me summarize all the steps :

• Include a proper Meta Tag.
• Rework on your Title Tag.
• Clean up your code/validate your code.
• Rework on your Image Tags.
• Update your site regularly.

Now our website is ready for the search engine. The next step is to promote our website, which I will be covering tomorrow. Until then happy optimizing.