This article is an explanation of my top 6 SEO tactics that yield the highest return in terms of organic search relevance. This is by no means an exhaustive list as there are many more tactics but, I felt that it is important to explain these initial tactics for the novice search marketer.
The basic premise of Search Engine Optimization is to look at each webpage in much the same way as a search engine. The engines like people want to provide the best possible “result” in this case for a given query. The search engines (SE) will do this by crawling the page and look at key page elements that expose the main content focus of the page. Unfortunately, we all want to be marketers and tend to try to tell too much of the “story” and end up overloading our webpages with content and this tends to confuse the crawlers as to the focus of a given webpage.
Starting with the concept of looking at a given page like a search engine we need to understand the focus of a webpage. If you look at a given webpage you realize that there is a particular topic (content) focus of the page. The engine is looking to pull the primary content focus from each webpage and add it into the search engine “index“. Our aim is to simplify this process for the crawlers by applying specific tactics to the target webpages. This allows the crawler to easily capture the focus of the page index the content and have it appear prominently in the search engine results page (SERP).
1. The first tactic for simplifying this process is to select the keyword or keyword phrase that best describes the content on the webpage. Once the keyword or phrase is selected need to place this term into the webpage “title” tag. The page title appears in the top of the browser or browser tab (depending on the web browser client) and is the primary link within the organic (SERP). This is done in the HTML code and is the #1 indicator of the content focus of the webpage and the #1 element the crawler looks to to determine the content focus of the page.
2. The second SEO tactic is to provide to the crawler with a compelling short description of the webpage content. The best way to do this is by creating a good “Meta Description“. The Meta Description is not part of the visible webpage content but is a key element that the crawler uses in providing the description of the title link in the (SERP). It is important to mention that the crawler will first try to pull this from the webpage text but, if it cannot extract a compelling phrase to describe the webpage it will default to the Meta Description. If there is no Meta Description the search result snippet will often be a mixed bag of text containing term from the keyword or phrase. The opportunity here is that by providing a focused Meta description the author can include a “call-to-action” similar to ones used in sponsored listings. This simple tactic can mean the difference between choosing your link over the competitor.
3. The third SEO tactic is where we begin to focus on the actual webpage content. In this tactic we simply place the target keyword into the primary page content heading or H1 tag. Sounds easy but this will always depend on the content. In my initial analysis of Ask.com content I found that many pages had heading text but this text was not designated as the H1 and therefore is seen as less important by the web crawlers. On the surface this does not not look like a big issue yet you will find it is very important for SEO keyword importance.
4. The fourth SEO tactic is to simply use the keyword or phrase several times in the body of the webpage text. This may sound like a “big duh”, well you would be surprised at how many times in the course of creating a webpage that this simple rule gets left out. This tactic of placing the target keyword into the webpage text creates what is referred to as “keyword density” and is just another way to inform the search engines the content focus of the particular webpage.
5. The 5th SEO tactic again involves the webpage content. In this tactic we use hyperlinks to enhance the how the content on multiple pages work together. Using text (keyword) based hyperlinks the content can support or be supported across multiple pages on a website. If you compared this to physical textbook these links amount to page references that tell the reader to go to a specific section of the book to get more information about the referenced topic. Again, the search engines want to provide the best result and it uses several ways to make sure the content is of a good quality.
6. The 6th SEO tactic in the “Top 6 Picks” is not related to the webpage content but instead is focused on insuring the webpage URL in in the search index. In this tactic we create a text based sitemap which is basically a simple list of URLs we want the search engines to crawl and index. Once created we submit the sitemap to the engines through a set of tools they provide specifically for this purpose.
On-Page Factors: The on-page factors are those elements of the page that effect the SEO performance based on keyword relevance.
1. Title Tags:
2. Heading (H1) Tags
3. Meta Descriptions
4. Body Copy
5. Text Links
6. Alt Tags
There more to talk about here but I think this is a good primer for understanding SEO tactics.
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