Search engine optimization is often ignored by some of the top company sites on the internet. I had one SEO expert tell me that his company did not need to optimize. They can just buy enough links to get them rated at number one. I did't want to tell him that it was only temporary because when the search engines find that Black Hat trick his company could be penalized.
Just so everyone knows, page optimization is not an outdated practice that fell by the wayside ages ago and is not used anymore. If that was true why are the search engines giving the webmasters the tools to use to optimize websites. There is more to getting to page one and staying there than most people think.
Even though linking is a huge factor every webmaster is chasing all of the links they can get. I think that there is so much linking going on the search engines are now leaning more towards on page factors. What I am going to do is to give you some hints that I think is important to tilt things in your direction and give you an advantage.
One of the most important factors is your title tag. Make sure the keyword you want to rank high for is in the title. Never put your company name in the title because search engines just do not care about that and it just wastes space. The search engines only count the first 64 characters anyway. Make sure you use only necessary words.
The meta keyword and description tags are not that important but I put them in anyway. Sometimes a search engines will use your description entered and others will pick a description out of your text.
Successful SEO is about doing everything right and using plenty of common sense. If you don't do enough you will not be ranked and if you do too much it could be considered spaming and you website could be banned. Remember that search engines do not index websites they index single pages. So make sure you optimize single pages.
I always use a h1 or h2 as my header tag at the top of a page. This must contain a keyword for SEO. This will help the search engines index your page and the visitor will know what the page is about. I think this has to be the second most important thing to do and counts high in the optimization lists. You can then divide your page into sections by using h2 or h3 tags containing more keywords.
In the first sentence after the title I always include my main keyword and I put it in italics so the search engines think it is important. Only do this one time per keyword. I had 3 of the same keywords in italics and rated number 17. Just by removing 2 of the italics I move to spot number 5 in one week. While this is no proof that the search engines think this is borderline spaming I did consider this a hint. You can use the bold tag or the underline tag here and the search engines will think this is important for some reason so they count that.
Another way to include a keyword is in the "alt" tag in a graphic. For instant I would not put "This is a computer" I would say "This is a SEO computer" if SEO is one of your keywords. Do this with all graphics it just might help.
One last trick I like is to include a h2 or h3 tag at the end of a page with a short sentence that includes a keyword in it. I do not know if this helps or not but I want one last chance for the search engines to remember what my main keyword is.
About the Author:
Don Young is the Owner of Day Web Design and
SEO Pro One