SEO, Search Engine Optimization Blog: On page SEO elements

Wednesday, 14 November 2012

It’s difficult to SEO

Yes, this is true. I had sat down to build my website. I thought it will be easy to get the pages up and running with the on page SEO elements. I was wrong. It is not as easy as they tell us in their articles and PDF tutorials. Making the deign layout and panning the website structure is not that easy too, but getting your SEO guns ready is far more difficult. I have designed the layout, had selected and tailored the images for my website. Have used Photoshop to build my graphics and have used Dreamweaver to make the web pages.

Now that I am hear doing my bit. My friend tells me to move to Joomla – the content management system. He said it is easier and faster to customize the Joomla web templates and the content management system has the SEO elements built in. I would find working with Joomla easy.

Great! But my friend does not know that I am comfortable with the CSS and the HTMLs. I don’t find any problems with building my site. I have been doing website design professionally and now I have turned around to start my part time business building websites for small businesses. I need my website up and put up some of the work I did for people who asked me to build their websites.

I like to be creative and I like to work out with colors and images. Building web content is what chases me off, but many of my clients did give their own content which I had placed in their websites. Now that I have also decided to optimize my customer’s website, I need to work through the SEO elements. I have learnt online how to optimize the sites. It seemed easy in the beginning but believe me I am not on the bed of roses.

I have searching for keywords, the most relevant keywords. I had also checked the competition for these keywords, heck, I found the competition too high. Then I had to choose lesser competitive keywords and had to settle for the second best, as I had learnt that getting to the first page for the lesser competitive keywords is easier. I need to take small steps. Get to the top for lesser competitive keywords and then leap up to fact high competition.

Tuesday, 23 October 2012

SEO –beyond the Meta Tags

SEO elements take up most of our concentration when we put efforts to make our websites search engine friendly. The On Page Elements extend beyond the Meta Title Tag, the Meta Descriptions Tag, the URL structure and the image optimization. We are, today, going to study an onsite SEO element that helps a great deal in search engine optimization.

Heading – (H1 to H6) Tags

We know that creative content has a big role to play. Neatly paragraphed text on the web page looks similar and uninteresting to the readers if the type style, fonts, sizes and color or the text are all the same. We also know that seldom few people read through the entire web page content. We need to mark the lines according to their importance; this will gives us two (2) benefits:

The website visitors can read through the important lines and decide whether to read further or not
The search engines crawl to index and read through the important areas of the text.

The H1 tag has its own importance. The characteristic of the written text, whether we are writing for the magazine or the newspaper, the people look for the headlines, these are generally the H1 tags in the terms of SEO.

H2, H3 to H6 are categorized with the level of importance these heading get from the search engines. Optimized H1 tags play a vital role. While building the script and while deciding upon the H1 tag, do consider the use of relevant keywords, so that the page being optimized gets its desired position on the search engines.

Google SEO best practice guide, guides us through the SEO science. About <H> tags it says, “Heading tags (not to be confused with the <head> HTML tag or HTTP headers) are used to present structure on the page to users. There are six sizes of heading tags, beginning with <h1>, the most important, and ending with <h6>, the least important.

Since heading tags typically make text contained in them larger than normal text on the page, this is a visual cue to users that this text is important and could help them understand something about the type of content underneath the heading text. Multiple heading sizes used in order create a hierarchical structure for your content, making it easier for users to navigate through your document.”