5 Things to Make Your Site More Optimized for Google…

This guest blog post comes from Chair 10 Marketing (partner of rno1), a Seattle SEO and pay-per-click agency serving clients across the U.S. and Canada.

Even companies that do the majority of their business online are looking to drive more potential customers to their website. Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential for the effectiveness of every website. SEO is a widely used technique to help search engines find and rank your website higher in search engine results, based upon your site’s relevance to a given search query.

By implementing these five key elements of SEO, companies both big and small can increase their presence on search engines.

1) Keywords

Before you begin to develop the content on your website, the first step in optimizing your website will be to identify which keywords your user will be searching for to find a page on your website. To get a better understanding of what people are searching for, first brainstorm a list of phrases you think your ideal customer is typing into Google to find your company. Once you have an initial list, take advantage of free online resources including the keyword tool available from Google Adwords to identify related keywords you may have overlooked as well as each keyword’s monthly search traffic. Choose 2-3 keyword phrases for each of your website’s pages, relevant to the pages’ topic or theme. You will need to identify keywords that are both relevant and that have an ample amount of searches each month.

2) Page Title Tags

Page title tags typically appear in the tabs at the top of your browser for each individual webpage, and are considered one of the most important elements for website optimization. Search engine crawlers index these crucial tags and give them a lot of weight in determining search rankings. The page title describes to users and search engines a brief snapshot of what the page content will discuss. It is important to include your chosen keywords (2-3 phrases) within the page title, and to ensure that a unique page title is associated with each webpage. You want to put your most important keywords first in your page title tag.

3) Keyword Density

The type of keywords you choose to focus on for your website is essential to ranking high in search engine results, but the frequency in which these keywords are used within the text of your page is just as essential for website optimization. The purpose of keyword density is to have a keyword repeated throughout the text of a particular page, therefore helping Google understand that your page is focused on this particular keyword. You can determine keyword density by the number of instances it appears in the page text, divided by the page text’s total amount of words displayed. Then multiply this by 100 to obtain a percentage. It is important to have a fair amount of text on a webpage to insert these keywords in, without disturbing its natural readability – shoot for 200 to 400 words per page. If keywords are repeated in excess, this can be referred to as ‘keyword stuffing,’ a black hat SEO technique that is now easily detected by search engines which allot spam penalties for this practice. Don’t exceed a density of 5% for any particular keyword on a page to avoid any penalties.

4) Text vs. Images

When search engine crawlers scan your webpage, an important feature they look at is its page text. As mentioned above, the choice of keywords and keyword density are both crucial in optimizing page text. Graphics and flash animations are essentially unreadable by search engines, and therefore an ample amount of text should be displayed on each webpage. You will need to optimize the page text by including your chosen keywords throughout the text, so that search engines are informed of what type of product or service the webpage is describing. Stick with a specific theme or topic for each webpage, with closely related keyword phrases. If you’re having trouble getting text onto a page, consider that text can be added lower down on the page so as not to impact the user experience you are striving for.

5) Page Headlines

A webpage’s headline is not only the first thing that a potential customer will read when landing on your website, but is also one of the first key elements search engines use when evaluating and analyzing your page. The most important headline is the H1 headline, or the first headline that describes the page’s overall content. To fully optimize the webpage, it is important to integrate a chosen keyword phrase into this headline. A website brings little positive benefit if no one can find it in the search engines. Though SEO may seem challenging, by implementing these five important optimization elements you will ensure that your website is both relevant and visible to search engines and web users.