5 Simple On Site SEO Tips for 2012
Mon, Jan 16, 2012
1. Only Post Quality Content Too many people think they can post any old content with keywords thrown in and this will be enough but if you wish to engage your visitors its essential to post quality content. If you follow every rule in the following tips, but your content is hard to read or provides little benefit to the reader, then you will struggle to get the search engine ranking and the conversions you are looking for. Make sure you always write for the reader first for maximum SEO impact.
2. Keyword Selection Before you create an SEO plan, you have to choose the right keyword phrases for your website. A good place to start is with a niche keyword phrase with plenty of searches each month but not highly competitive. It’s often not good to start with the big gun keywords as they will take longer to achieve and initially more time intensive. You can use the free Google keyword tool or various other keyword tools for SEO assistance when searching for the right keyword phrases. You then need to build your quality content around these keywords.
3. Using Keyword Phrases Once you have chosen your keyword phrase, the next step is to use it effectively across your content. You want to include it once in your page headers (you should try to use a header 1, header 2, and header 3), these are HTML ‘h’ tags. Once in the first and last sentence of the content, and throughout the post or page to give you a keyword density of 1% to 3%. This will help to give you the best on page SEO possible without being penalised by Google.
4. Adding Images Another way to get even better SEO from your content is to add an image. When you do this, you want to include the keyword phrase you are targeting as the “ALT” tag. This is SEO help you desperately need and adding an image with an “ALT” tag can help you gain more traffic from higher search engine ranking.
5. Linking Properly Finally when you create many posts or pages, they need to be linked together. This helps the search engine spiders to find all your content and index it more effectively. You want to include a link to another post or page on your website or blog within each post or page you create. The anchor text of this link should be your main keyword phrase where possible.
And to sum it up… Remember if you build a site with quality content then people will want to link to you. Including share buttons means people will share this quality content. Focus on user engagement after all Google wants to bump up popular content not just the best SEO content. Have a mix of follow and nofollow links out of your site. Look like a brand online not an SEO spammer as Google loves it’s brands. Remember SEO is a long term marketing strategy and once you have updated your on site SEO it’s time to prepare your off site SEO strategy….new article coming soon.
What are your On Site SEO tips for 2012?
Zak is the Director of Red Alien and an experienced SEO consult, passionate about online integrity, user experiences and optimisation strategies. Zak has worked with companies of all sizes from start-ups to big brands and charities.
