Writing your own Web Page, On-page Optimisation Tutorial
A Free Crash Course in Web Design using Keywords
Welcome back to my Free Web design tutorial. On-page Search Engine Optimisation
So far in lesson one, lesson two, lesson three, lesson four and lesson five we covered all aspects of the design & layout of a Web page. Then in lesson six we learned how to write good copy content to keep your visitors on your page. This lesson is called On-page Search Engine Optimisation.
If you've done the foolish thing and got ahead of yourself putting in your title, keywords, description etc. then uploaded to the Web, maybe even submitted that site to a few search engines and hoped that people would mysteriously show up at your site and buy whatever it is you were selling. Then you're going to be seriously disappointed.
Then a couple of weeks go by and only a few stray people show up at your website. If you're one of the "smart" few, you might have even tried to "optimise" your website around your main keyword in hopes that you just might rank well in one of the millions of search engines. Another couple of weeks go by and still no luck. No visitors... and no money. What a complete waste of your time!
At this point you probably give up and decide to either build another website around a different market or just lose all hope and quit. Well, news flash, as you've probably figured out by now, that is NOT the way to go about doing things. These days you can't just create a bunch of websites and expect people to just show up at your website and buy your "stuff".
This was possible back in the late 90s and even early 2000s, but not anymore, as you've probably found out by now.
Lesson 7
I left you at the end of last lesson thinking hard about the wording of your very first paragraph. With that fresh in your head, today we're going to do what is called On-page search engine optimisation. On-page optimisation is not the complete answer to your problems, it's just the start of getting things right.
You're not stupid. You've no-doubt figured out that a keyword is a word that is written within your site (probably several times), which is related to what it is you do, or rather what your page is about. You've guessed that your main keyword is so important that you also have it in the page title and the H1 page heading.
A keyword does not need to be a single word. It could be, and it could be several words in a short phrase.
You may have read through your page and identified loads of words and short phrases that relate to what you do, and only what you do nothing else. That's fine...
Please don't be angry about what I'm going to say next! I've made you re-write your page several times already. Well you're going to have to do it again. And again, and probably again. I'm doing this for your own good!
From that list of words and phrases that you've just gathered. Choose the most important and make sure you repeat them exactly the same way (same spelling) at least 3 times, up to a maximum of about 7 times throughout your whole document. And proof-read your page again to make sure it makes sense. Store your list of words somewhere for later.
"Within your document" includes headings, paragraphs, and in the ALT text for images (if related). It's ideal if you can include ONLY your main keyword within the H1 header tag. Not the H2 tag. But also throughout the page text copy.
You should place your 2nd most important keyword in the H2 header tag. And also throughout the page text copy.
When writing words into the page content, try to evenly sprinkle your main keywords throughout the copy. Don't overdo it though. Try to mention each keyword in a natural way as you are writing, but be sure to include at least one of the keywords per 1-2 paragraphs, depending on how large your page is.
TIP - Make sure to mention your main keyword at the very top left and the very bottom right hand side of the webpage. A trick I like to use is to include this in the copyright information line at the bottom of the website. For our example Growing Palm Trees in the UK, this would be a good example:
Copyright © www.domain.com 2007 Growing Palm Trees in the UK by Phil Markey
Notice that it flows and doesn't really look too strange.
Once we've finished writing the copy, we should go through and bold, underline, or italicise some of the keywords only 1 time each, maximum. Only do 1 per keyword or it will hurt you more than it helps. This isn't crucial to do, but it's good to maybe do this to a couple keywords...
Force Google To Read Your Keywords First!
Now, remember I stated above that Google views your webpage from top left, to bottom right? Well, in general they do. But because most websites contain a left hand column which contains all of their navigation links...
Google WILL View all of the text in the left hand column Before The Body of the webpage
I've tried my hardest to teach you NOT to do this throughout this tutorial. You might not have listened to me. What can I do..? I'm teaching you all these things for very good reasons.
"When are we going to get around to writing that first paragraph like you promised?" I hear you ask. Well, I'm trying to save you extra work! You might have to re-write it all again yet!
Now choose your most important word or phrase (Just one, your top one). Open Google in Firefox and search your word or phrase.
Search Google for your most important word or phrase. Here I've searched for the phrase "weight loss".
From this I conclude that my chosen word "weight loss" is not a good one.
DO NOT start off by optimising for the keyword "weight loss".
Why, you ask? If you were to optimise your website for this keyword, you'd be competing against over 449 million other websites! I don't know about you, but that's an awful lofty goal to start with.
Not only is the competition fierce, but think about it... How targeted is the keyword "weight loss" anyway? Not very targeted at all. Someone searching for the keyword "weight loss" could very well be looking for free information on weight loss. They might be looking for the definition of weight loss. It's really hard telling. Chances are, they're not looking for anything specific about losing weight.
For a brand new website, or one you're just beginning to optimise, it's better to select more specific "long tail" keyword phrases. If your word has too many search results re-think your word changing it just a little so that it basically reads the same thing and search again until you get fewer results returned. Do the same with your other top keywords. I use some very smart software to find good keywords called Keyword Elite which I'll talk about in detail in the next lesson.
So now we hope you're getting fewer results returned for your keyword in Google. Take a look at the No.1 returned site in the search results.
Disclaimer: - You'll hear a lot of people talk about how "on-page optimisation", which are the things I'm going to be talking about below, aren't as important as they once were. While that is true. It IS important to look at on-page optimisation factors to determine if your competition really knows what they're doing in terms of optimising their websites.
Chance are, if they have good on-page optimisation, their off-page optimisation will also be good. Think of these steps as a quick and easy way to determine how competitive a market is before you jump straight into it. There's my disclaimer. If you're new to SEO and that didn't make sense, that's ok. Just ignore it. It's not important, but was said for those people that like to nit pick at every comment made :-) Moving on!
For my article I searched for "UK Hardiness Zones", and not surprisingly the No.1 result returned is a page I made. It's a similar subject to my interests and there are only 163,000 results. It's irrelevant that it's mine that's No.1. The point is that it's not so many returned results (163,000) for my keyword. So It's a good one to try and beat.
Click on the top search result to open the page. You'll notice that the top website has a Google Page Rank of 3, 4, 5 or even higher.
Note: - Here's a quick definition of Google Page Rank. Page Rank is Google's way of giving a specific value to how popular a website is. It is based on the number of "votes" other websites cast for another website. A "vote" is simply when another website places a link on their website that is pointing to another website. Generally, the more "votes" or links you have pointing to your website, the higher your Page Rank (PR) will be. Page Rank is one of the many factors that Google takes into account when ranking websites.
Moving on...
Most websites online have between a 2 and 5 Page Rank. The extremely popular, high traffic websites tend to have Page Rank's of 6 and 7. A select few will have Page Ranks of 8 and 9... and only a couple websites on the entire internet will have a Page Rank of 10. Those websites would be sites like google.com themselves. If a website has a Page Rank of 7 or higher, it would be best to not try to outrank them.
Remember, the ONLY way to increase our website's Page Rank is by getting other websites to link to us.
* Critical: Later, I'll teach you the right way to get hundreds of links pointing to your website in a matter of several days... and I'll go into more detail about Page Rank.
View the source code for the page you're analysing. View then Page Source or Ctrl+U in the Firefox browser.
As we view the source file from this website, we need to look for a few things, which include:
- Whether or not they are using <h1> header tags and are placing the keyword within those tags. If in your case, when you do a search for this tag/text, we find that they are not... AND not only are they not using the keyword inside of their H1 tags, but they aren't even using <h1> header tags at all. That's another great thing for us.
- Whether or not they are using their main keyword in the <title> tags of the website. I'm sure they would be, which is one of the main reasons they're currently ranked highly for the word you searched for.
The <title> tag is simply the text that appears at the top of the browser window as shown below:
- Whether or not they've bolded, underlined, or italicised the words anywhere in the body of the webpage.
- Whether or not they are using ALT image tags and placing the keyword within that tag.
- The final thing we want to note is whether or not they've placed the keyword once towards the very beginning of the web page, and once at the very end of the web page.
* Remember - the main idea behind ranking well on Google is to analyse the top ranked websites and then do those things that they're doing, BUT just a little better to one up them, which should lead to a better ranking.
In summary, I really want to point out the fact that, although good on-page optimisation is something you'll really want to do, it is NOT how you make dramatic changes in your search engine ranking!
Important! - Let me repeat that again, on-page optimisation... which is what I've taught you thus far, will make small changes in your ranking, but WILL NOT help your site make dramatic jumps in ranking.
This is one of the biggest misconceptions in the search engine world. Many believe that by getting your keyword density just right, or by moving your keywords around on the page in just the right places, you'll really move up in the search engines.
That is not the case at all. It is the off-page optimisation factors that will get you high rankings. In a few lessons time I will teach you exactly what off-page optimisation factors are, AND how to make sure you optimise these factors perfectly for Google!
All the best,
Phil Markey
Retired Professional Web Developer