SEO Page Optimization Tips Big Picture

Search Engine Optimization is a never ending learning experience for professionals all over the board. Even successful Online Marketing Specialists and Directors constantly have to stay up to date with the latest SEO tactics and search engine algorithm updates. Here are a few SEO page optimization tips that you can take with you to your website or blog.

1. Do your keyword research

Understand your target and narrow it down. To start with, it is unrealistic to rank high on hundreds of keywords on a small website or blog. Do your research using the Google Keyword Planner. You want to narrow down your research to focus on up-to-date search keywords. Choose the list of keywords you want to rank high on and start from there. The amount of keywords you choose depends on how much help you have and the competitive level on the keywords based on the info you gather from the Google Keyword Planner (low, medium or high). You can still get a lot of traffic from keywords with a low competitive score. 

2. Optimize Page Titles

Page titles are also fairly important to search engines and not very difficult to optimize. It is important to consider consistent, relevant and clean keywords. For example: This post title is: SEO Page Optimization Tips. The page title is SEO Page Optimization Tips | Back Road Building. The search keyword is: seo page optimization tips. Finally, the META description will also ideally include the chosen search keyword phrase (A meta description is an HTML and XHTML element that describes your page to search engines. While the perceived (and real) importance of meta data has depreciated, the attribute still plays a significant role in SEO rankings). It may be tempting to add lots of rich keywords to your page title but search engines only display 70 characters of your title. You want your page titles to be keyword rich but not too much. Just think of good page titles you see in search engines that you would click on.

3. Optimize URLs

Most of the new online platforms such as WordPress, Big Commerce and Square Space, will optimize your URLs for you but it's good to understand it so you can optimize it accordingly. It's great practice to use your page title in the URL. For example, this post is titled SEO Page Optimization Tips. Notice the URL? http://www.backroadbuilding.com/seo-on-page-optimization-tips/. Fairly simple! Every now and then your page or post title will have a few stop words. This is where you don't want to include them in the URL. A fun word art image of stop words!

SEO on page optimization tips

In computing, stop words are words which are filtered out prior to, or after, processing of natural language data (text).[1] There is not one definite list of stop words which all tools use and such a filter is not always used. Some tools specifically avoid removing them to support phrase search.

Stop Word definition via Wikipedia

4. Optimize Page Content

Content is king and your page content will include the most information. Look at your page or post and look for your focus or your chosen search keyword. As I am writing this blog post, I stop to check how often I've mentioned my chosen search keyword. After checking, I see that I've used it 5 times. Using it too many times can go against your end goal. This is called "keyword stuffing". It basically looks like you are trying to trick search engines to rank high for that keyword. Have your search keyword as H1 somewhere at the top of the page and at least one H2 on the page. It's also good to make sure you have at least 300 words in your page or post. You want your page to be informative and useful to readers. Search engines also like to see images that contain alt tags with the target search keyword. It's also nice to include outbound links, as this is a great way to engage your readers. When you are linking out to related websites, it not only helps search engines understand your focus, but also helps in increasing the authority and quality of your site. This plays an important role in SEO.

Try to remember that too much of anything isn't good! Try to write as much original and helpful content you possibly can. Google and other search engines have become very smart and even though there are algorithms that help you rank high, these algorithms are configured to perform as a human mind would. If your content is good and your site is up-to-date, you have a high chance of ranking high.

BELOW IS A QUICK SUMMARY OF THINGS TO REMEMBER:

- Include your search keyword in the URL, H1, H2, body, page title and meta description

- Include outbound links (not too many)

- Include your search keyword in the first paragraph of your page

- Try to have between 40 to 70 characters in your page title

- Try to make your meta description appealing and specific to your page or post