On Page SEO Basics Part1

 



Keywords form the spine of search engine optimization and should be the first thing you learn about in Seo Basics . They perform the most important role in search engine optimization and they are literally the keys to the pages within your site. On page they are like the DNA of your content, informing the search engines of what the content is about. Off page they play an even more important role of being used as the anchor text to a link to the web page, again to inform the search engines of what the site is about.



When your site is new, Google will send out its spiders to crawl your pages, they literally run over everything on the pages, photos, videos, the text, graphics and links and what they do is make up a picture of what your page is about and store it in Google’s memory. They will take into account many things, like the amount of time words are repeated, the names of your pictures and the description of your site. This will tell Google or any other search engine what that page is about. Once it knows what your page is about it can then show it in the results for the keyword terms it thinks are relevant to the page.



You see then, just how important it is to optimize the pages within our site for specific keywords that we want to be found for.



One thing you must remember in seo basics is that the search engines show pages not sites.



How do we optimize our pages then for specific keywords? Nobody knows for sure the exact algorithms that the search engines use but over the years we found out roughly what works, gives us the best results and more importantly what doesn’t do our sites any harm.

On Page SEO Basics keyword placement

The first thing we need to do is make sure that our "keyword density" the amount of times the keyword that we want our page to be found for, is repeated. This should be around 1 to 3% any more than that and the text doesn’t read naturally, even at 2-3% sometimes it doesn’t sound right. Remember the most important thing is to give quality content to your readers. The keyword density can be increased by using the keyword to name your images.



Second is to include our keyword in the page title. This is very important. One of the very first websites I built had 20 pages and instead of publishing each page after I had written it, I gave each page a title, which was the keyword I wanted each page to be optimize for. I then published the page and intended to add the content as and when I was ready. Well I ended up adding about 6 or 7 pages then realized that I had researched my keyword wrong and gave up on the site. It was only a couple of months ago that I checked on site and wow I was surprised, many of the pages were on the first page of Google for their respective keywords. And guess what some of those pages had no content at all just the page title which was the keyword……… Admittedly the keyword had very low competition and was not searched for that often, that’s was why I decided to give up on the site, But it goes to prove that having your keyword in the title is very powerful.







Search engine optimization can be a huge subject and to the beginner can easily become very over whelming. With the many acronyms and technical jargon it can seem kind of like double Dutch. I have tried to deliver the basics of search engine optimization at a very simple and easy to understand level starting with keywords, what they are and how we use them.



Seo Basics