Comprehensive guide to Organic, Natural, Search Engine
Optimization. Page 4
SEO Tutorial
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Body copy or text
This is
your content, so give Google every opportunity to discover what it is about your
content that is important. Stick with white hat techniques and methods. Trying
to fool the engines is just too dangerous. Professional search engine
optimization requires great body copy.
Presenting
the information in an outline format is one good way to show Google what you
want it to see. Use the heading elements (h1, h2, h3, etc) to organize the
important ideas in your content in an hierarchal arrangement.
Headings
should be formatted with heading elements, and headings elements should only be
used for headings, nothing else. Format your body copy with paragraph elements —
not just with divs, spans and classes. Google can’t determine the importance of
the words with these types of formatting.
Work your
keyword phrases and variations into the headings in a way that reads naturally
to a human being. Don’t over due it or try to stuff in too many keywords.
In most
cases less than about 250 words of text isn’t going to do you much good as far
as SEO is concerned. Ideally you should have typically between 400 and 600
words per page. That’s not to say you shouldn’t have any pages with small
amounts of text, but try to keep them at a minimum.
By the
time you have 800 – 1000 words of text you are wasting a good opportunity to add
another page to your total. Spread it out to two pages. Google will consider
your site just that more important and authoritarian with every extra page you
generate. And more title opportunities too.
On each
page use one(1) h1 heading, one h2, and one h3 in that order, and then use as
many h4, h5, and h6 tags as appropriate for sub headings.
The h1 tag
can be copied from the Title or be similar. The h2 tag can be copied from the
meta description tag, and shortened or modified as desired to fit the page and
sound like it’s for human consumption.
The h3 tag
is a good place for company information or something about the products or
services.
Avoid the use of
duplicate content both from within your site and from outside your site. When
Google sees duplicate content it ignores it, and it won’t therefore do you any
good.Try to have your
primary keyword phrases in both the first and last paragraphs of your page, and
once or twice elsewhere in the body copy.
Directory and File names
Use
descriptive names in your directory and file names. File names with more than
one word should use “-“to separate the words. The “-“character tells the search
engines that the words should be separate and not one long word. Underscores do
not do this.
Don’t use more than
three words if possible, and don’t make it obvious that you are just keyword
stuffing file names. Make it seem natural and organic.
Image Alt Tags
Use
the image alt tags as they were designed to be used…to describe a picture so
that blind people and browsers that don’t display images know what the image is
about. In the image alt tags give a good detailed description of the image and
work some keywords or phrases in if appropriate. Remember…write for humans.
Include some nearby text with the keywords repeated or with an image caption to
increase the affect of the keywords in the image alt tags.
Don’t use alt tags with spacer gifs and the like.
Use clean code
Not
all pages get spidered, not all spidered pages get indexed, and not all of the
material on very long pages will necessarily be indexed.
Move your CSS and Javascript to externally referenced files and use CSS for all
formatting to reduce the amount of code that is not content Get rid of all
redundant spaces and tabs and unnecessary formatting code. This makes your pages
more spider friendly. Make your urls short and us as few variables in them as
you can if you have a dynamic site.
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