SEO – How to Optimize Your WebSite

SEO—Search Engine Optimization—probably only counts for between 10% to 30% of your web Traffic, but is vitally important, nonetheless — Especially if you plan to Monetize Your Website.

Good SEO simply means adhering to accepted Web Standards.

First we will talk about the basic elements that belong in each and every web page, then we will look at a few great tools to help us out.

A Fully Search Optimized Web Page

Every web page at minimum needs the following:

• Title
• Description
• Keywords and/or Key Phrases
• Headings & Sub-Headings
• Alt Tag for each and every graphic
• Keyword Rich page URL

Beyond the bare bones, each should have:

• Key Words & Phrases sprinkled throughout the page
• All Links in Anchor Text format
• Anchor Text Links to other pages within your site
• Emphasized Key Words & Phrases

The foundation of all of this, of course is:

• Domain Name
• Overall WebSite Title

SEO Begins with the Title

To be honest, you can go just a bit kookoo trying to come up with the perfect Title. And you have to be ingeniously creative for each and every page. The Title is your Headline, and should halt the scanning view of the eyes and motivate the Searcher to click on your page — Instead of someone else’s.

Let’s work on this page together. As always, I would greatly appreciate any comments or suggestions.

SEO is an obvious Buzz Word, er, Keyword. WebSite and Optimize also fall into that category. So right off the bat we have some good fodder for the Search Engines.

The Title is what you see in the Browser Bar at the top left, and it’s what you see on the Search Page. Here is my PartTimeTrader site. The Title, “Daily Market Analysis is the first thing in the Browser Bar, which is mirrored in the URL, “daily-analysis.” The overall Site Title, Day Trading Swing Trading System,”  follows the Page Title. A bit of a goofy name for a site, but it’s all Keyword Phrases.

Different Themes have their own way of dealing with this, but since this site is using Thesis, here is what we did here:

WordPress incorporates the Page Headline as the Page Title, but Thesis allows you to embellish the Browser Bar / Search Engine Title with a little bit more, in this case we added ” | Internet Marketing Home Business.” Yep, lots more Keyword Phrases.

And here’s what it looks like:

It has been very commonly suggested that your Title should be no more than 70 characters, including spaces. This clocks in at 68 characters. But here is how this looks on the Google SERP.

Add SEO Keywords to Your Page Title’s URL

I should point out here, that for the URL to show up nice and Keyword Rich, you must go into the WordPress Control Panel to Settings / Permalinks.

Change Common settings from Default to Custom Structure and type this:

%postname%

Now WordPress will take your Page Headline and turn it into a very readable, Search Friendly URL, rather than the default gobbley gook page URL, which is totally useless:

?p=259

It means nothing to the Search Engines and nothing to those you are trying to entice into your, uhm, web. An important thing to note is that you can change your URL so it’s a bit different from your Page Title. In other words you may wish to make your URL a little more Keyword Rich for the Search Engines while keeping the Page Title more readable for your visitors.

Page Description: The Sub-Headline

Next on our list is the Description. What do we want the people to see on the Search page? We want to pack this with Keyword Phrases, but we do want it to be readable. To be safe, we are shooting for 150 characters. We don’t want our very important Description, our Advertising, if you please, trailing off so the customer can’t finish rea…

We want to put our most important words at the beginning. We need to catch and hold their attention instantly. So if the Title is our Headline, the Description is actually our Sub-Headline.

Here is what I typed into the Description box of the Thesis SEO:

SEO Search Engine Optimization is vital, but not difficult if you follow a few simple rules. Here is the Checklist of What to do, and How to do it. SEO Counts for up to 30% of your Page Rank.

That is more than 150 Characters. At the end of ” and How to do it” was 147 characters. From that point onward I assume cut off someplace, but I don’t want to be wasteful by not using all that I had, so I threw “SEO” in there one more time and let the dot dot dot’s fall where they will.

Many say we must have Keywords specifically listed, yet others say that ever since the early wild west days of (false) Keyword Stuffing, the Engines don’t pay much attention to them anymore. My philosophy is: Maybe they don’t , but it can’t hurt if you do it correctly.

I think the best advice I have heard about Keywords is to keep them down to three of your most important. Adding more, as the reasoning goes, dilutes the importance of each. I have seen website Keyword lists that try to cram absolutely every conceivable word or combination thereof, so as to be sure the Engines don’t miss them. But then you have to ask, What is the real Focus of the Page?

For better or worse, I’m typing this into the Thesis Keyword Box:

SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Keywords

That’s what this page is all about, and those are the phrases that keep popping up throughout this page. They are also in most of the Headings. And that of course is one of the other SEO parts of our Checklist. We must ensure that the Keywords are actually in the page. A lot. Not too much mind you, so as to appear as we are stuffing the page. But let’s face it, they are not called Keywords for nothing; they are the Keys to the Content of the page.

Optimized Headings for Good SEO

From here, we are finished with fun things to enter into boxes. Now we focus on Page organization. It’s always important to Start with the H1 Heading tag. But only once. As I understand it, not all WordPress Themes designate the Page Title as H1. All of mine do. To check yours, bring up the actual page outside of the admin editor, and right-mouse-click to bring up the little menu. Then look for Source, or View Source, or whatever your browser uses. Then do a Find for the term H1 (not Case Sensitive).

When writing a WordPress page or post, you should only be concerned with H2 and H3. Let’s face it, if your page is so involved that it needs 4 or more levels of Headings, you may want to divide your pages up into smaller chunks.

You want your Page Keywords in your Headings. Several SEO tools are adamant that you must have Headings down to H3. Don’t sweat the idea. Just write your copy and then go back and insert Headings where they would fit very naturally.

Optimize Your Graphics with ALT Tags

Every graphic within your website should have an ALT Tag describing the picture. The idea is that if the graphic doesn’t load or the person has graphics turned off (this doesn’t happen so much anymore, with High Speed Internet) your audience could read the ALT tag and understand what they are supposed to be seeing. But you can do a little more with them, and slip some Keywords into the Tag, but don’t over-do it simply because no one sees it.

Here is how I typically do my PartTimeTrader.com Charts for my Daily Analysis. The File name is “SP-080410,” which I gave it at the time I created the file. That’s for my personal reference. WordPress requires I give it a Title, so I give it a solid description, “PartTimeTrader Market Analysis SP-080410.gif,” using the actual File name at the end. Then the ALT Text has important Keywords: My website, PartTimeTrader, the S&P 500, and Chart. The Caption also has Keywords, but is very readable and makes sense as a Caption, “S&P 500 Daily Chart for August 4, 2010.” If I wanted to I could make the graphic clickable, but in that context there is no reason to.

Links with Keyword Anchor Text is Good SEO

How often have you seen links like this: http://parttimetrader.com/ptt/fibcalc/fibonacci-trading-calculator-stocks-forex/

The way you want to do it is this like: Rick LaPoint’s Fibonacci Calculator

To quote directly from Wikipedia,

The words contained in the anchor text can determine the ranking that the page will receive by search engines.

If that’s the case, we want to be sure the Text of the Link is Keyword Sensitive. But then again, if you notice my long URL above without Anchor Text, I was careful about how I designed the URL in the first place, as we discussed a section or two back. Indeed, I even created a new Parent, called FibCalc, simply so I could include that word, into several pages that fell under that topic. But with the Anchor Text I can also add my name.

If you Google, “Rick LaPoint Fibonacci,” this is what you see on Page One:

My name is so associated with “Fibonacci” I didn’t even have to include the word, “Calculator.” Notice that every listing there is pointing to my website, and most of the listings are not even my website at all — they are Backlinks. If you look closely, you’ll see that the first two listings are other sites linking to me, and the 3rd listing pulls a quote from a Testimonial. And of course, toward the end is one of my YouTube Videos containing my same Keywords.

The point is, my name is a Keyword, so it’s important to use it in the Anchor, that way I can layer Keywords on top and underneath, both visible and invisible.

Readable Anchor Text is especially important if your URL is gobbley gook, but if we follow good SEO as outlined above, it won’t be.

Tools to Help Optimize Your Website for Search Engines

If you don’t have a premium WordPress Theme like Thesis, you can download a the FREE All-in-One SEO Plugin, which will help by giving you some boxes to fine tune your Titles and such. A nice feature is the Character Count, so you know exactly where the drop-off area is.

A Plugin that is NOT free, is SEOPressor, which I am using on this page as we speak. Here is where I stand at this moment. But there a few problems with this Plugin.

The Keyword I’m testing for is “SEO”. The H1 Tag is actually my Page Title, so it really is present, after all. And “SEO” is in my last sentence. And I will have to go into the HTML to change the outbound Links to “NoFollow.” (I may be industrious, but that would be fairly tedious.) The theory behind NoFollow to other sites is that it “dilutes” your own Link Juice. But Google sees them anyway, so if you are linking to outsiders, you are linking to outsiders. Google knows it. Do you really lose your mojo by linking to others? I have no idea. Although I have heard and tend to believe that if you have hundreds of links to the outside, Google assumes you have no Juice, er, Content of your own in the first place. That makes more sense to me.

Also, I have sprinkled other, related Keywords, such as, well, “Keyword,” and “Optimize(d),” and “Search Engine Optimization.” As I understand it, the Google Algorithm sees those related words and considers them Relevant to the Keyword. So it’s an interesting and informative tool, but it has its limitations.

Here is a great tool that is FREE, but you need the Fox Fire Browser, which any serious Web Marketer has anyway. It’s SEO Doctor, by Vladimir Prelovac. Let’s see how this tool sees this page right this moment. Now my SEO score reads a much better 96%. The only problem seems to be My Title is too long by eight characters. But up above we saw that 68 characters fit just fine.

Notice though, that this tool recognizes that my Page Title does indeed have the H1 Heading Tag.

Well, there you have it. The work never ends. I trust this has been helpful. And just for SEOPressor, this will be the last sentence with Keyword, SEO in it