Header tags for improved SEO

Another on page search engine optimization factor is the header tag. Headers can go to various levels with the highest being 1 and then continuing down through 2, 3, 4 etc.

To create a header tag in HTML use the following format:

<h1>This is a header one tag</h1>

There is an issue where the automatic format of a header one tag is to have a large font. This can mean that a long header looks rather odd on your web page. There are two ways to get around this. One way is to define the header tag with your preferred font.  The following is an example that I use in www.criticalmass.biz/seo-made-easy.htm

h1 {color:#CCOOOO;font-size:24px}

You can alter the font size to whichever font you like.

A second option is to alter your CSS or cascading style sheet. This can reflect on all of your header tag formats not just the one page which is the example above.

Regards

Ron

Title Tags for improved SEO

Title tags are meta tags that are used in the web page to show what the page theme is. For example, in the website http://www.criticalmass.biz, I have the following title tag:

<title>seo|Search Engine Optimization</title>

If you go to that site, the heading in the tab at the top will show those same terms as in the brackets. The search engines use the  title tag as one of the key items in determining what your website is about.

As seen above, you can use the bar ‘|’ to separate keywords if you want to have multiple keywords on your page.

There are many highly ranked sites that don’t seem to use title tags. It means that it is not necessarily that difficult to beat those sites in the search engine rankings.

To see what the title tag is on any  website, you need to view the source code. This can be done for most websites. You need to ahve the website displayed in your browser e.g. Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc. In Internet Explorer, you need to click the ‘Page’ tab and then click view source.  This will display  the HTML source code behind the web page.

In Firefox, click the View Menu item, then click ‘page source’. This will then display the source code.

Regards

Ron

Importance of Keywords for SEO

Many beginners look at the demand for information and believe that they can easily grab top spot with what they believe is great content. I should know as I also did believe that once. It’s not quite that simple. There are too many websites competing for some of those top keywords.

What you need is a few good tools to help you. The first tool is goodkeywords a free but great tool for working out the potential traffic for your keywords. It will show you the traffic count from Overture for your keyword and related keywords. Multiply the traffic count by 10 to get an idea of what it would be for Google. This is your potential customer market!

After this you need to enter the same keyword into the Google search engine to see how many websites are offering content based on that keyword. This is your potential competition! If there is too much competition then look at some of the related keywords to see which ones have better ratio of potential cusotmers to potential competitors. Some marketers seem to think that this is good SEO practice.

However my preference is to look at absolute numbers for the competition. There may be 10 million competitors and you may be able to beat 90% but that still means that there are 9 million ahead of you.

If there are only 10,000 or so competitors then yous tand a chance of getting close to the front on the search engine rankings. So look at some of the lower ranked keywords, aggregate a few of them together and you are more likely to get some great traffic. If you aggregate many of them together you will then begin to appear as a higher ranked website for some of the more popular related keywords as well. This is called ‘long tail’ SEO or keyword practice.

Some more next time.

Ron

Improve your SEO by linking your sites including blogs

I have been doing a bit of playing around with blogs lately. I have a couple of different ones including http://ronyseo.wordpress.com/ and http://www.criticalmass.biz/blog. Both are notionally dedicated to Search Engine Optimization with this one focussed more on the technical aspects.

I realised that although I had a link to my site through Blogroll, I didn’t have a link to my blog from the website. I have now put up the link so that it appears on every page of my site. I still need to explore how best to do it as I don’t want it to appear to be a straight link swap.

If you go to the site, http://www.criticalmass.biz and look at the navigation links, you will notice that I have labelled the links to the blogs as SEO Blog #1 and #2. The label is important as it tells the search engines that the blog is related to Search Engine Optimization. The label is a very important component of the link.

Regards

Ron

Improve your SEO through a simple layout change

It is recognised that the Search Engines look for relevant keywords on your website and the closer that they are to the top the higher the ranking. It is often not recognised that where there is a tablen or column layout, then the search engines look cell by cell for relevant keywords.

Most people have either an ad or navigation links on the top left hand side of their website. The search engine will recognise this and may then see your keyword headings. A simple change is to introduce a blank cell above the advertisement or navigation links. If the cell is blank, then the search engine moves across into the centre column where hopefully is your heading with the highly important keyword.

This simple change can influence your website seo ranking considerably.

Until next time.

Regards

Ron

Internal linking strategy #1

Most people, including newbies, know that links are essential to getting a high Google page rank. But even the moderate SEO person sometimes can learn something. Only last week I found out that for my internal links e.g. in my menu, I was doing something that could be improved. For my internal menus I had the top entry labelled ‘home page’. Unfortunately Google would read this as just an ordinary link. I should label it ‘SEO home page’.

So I have done this on my site, http://www.criticalmass.biz. I have the left panel as a generic left panel that is added to every page on my site. A simple change to this and the menu on every page was changed to reflect that the home page is ‘SEO home page’ so that Google sees that there are more pages referring to my home page as the SEO home page. This gives more authority to my home page, particularly in referring it as an SEO site.

Embedding Youtube video into your site

Adding both visual appeal to viewers and a link for the search engines can be done by embedding video e.g. from Youtube or from Google into your site. The following video from Youtube is one on Search Engine Optimization so is worth watching from that viewpoint alone.

Regards

Ron

SEO strategies

SEO activities can be seen to be daunting as there is so much to do. I have found that one strategy is to categorise the different activities into On-Page and Off-Page groups. That way when I identify a new activity e.g. from reading someone’s blog or a forum entry or an email SEO course, then I can group it into the appropriate heading. Under each heading I can then prioritise the list and start working my way down.

I try not to look at the whole list as it looks rather daunting. I do know that if I start at the top and do one item a day or every second day then my sites will move up in the rankings. If I don’t do anything, they will remain where they are or maybe even move down a bit – like 95% of the other sites on the Internet.

A little bit of action places me in the top 5% of Internet Marketers.

Regards

Ron

SEO from A to Z

This is my first post on SEO or Search Engine Optimization. It will link in with my web site, www.criticalmass.biz. I have come a long way in the past year and plan to assist yo