Optimizing your Webpages (Part 1) – Yes, it’s IMPORTANT!

So you want to be #1 on Google for a particular search term? Did you optimize your webpages? If not, forget about it because you’ll really never get there. Most business owners don’t know what needs to be done to optimize a website for SEO. Today, I’ll show you what’s required. We’re going to take our own website and show you what is done.

One of the terms our website ranks well for is “san diego web design forum”. Let’s take a look at what is implemented on the website to make sure we’re obtaining what we call “On Page” optimization:

1. Title Tags: This is the text that appears in the Title Bar of your Website. Notice in ours the Title Tags read: “San Diego Web and Website Design Help“. Did you know that this is the text that also gets picked on Google for your Link Text. If you Google the text “San Diego Web Design Forum” you’ll see we have two listings in Google #2 and #3 spots. The first listing shows the text “San Diego Web and Website Design Help • View forum – Web …” as the link text. Now do you see how important this is?

2. URL Strings: In our last segment we spoke about the importance of your domain name having the primary text term you’d like to rank for. Similarly your directories should be named with terms comparable to your the term you’d like to rank well for. In our website you’ll notice www.websiteservice4all.com/websitedesignforum is the full string which contains both the terms “website”, “design”, and “forum” within the text. This helps Google understand what the pages are about. If you have your directories named something like “info” or “product” when you could name them a search term instead you’re doing yourself an injustice on your rankings.

3. H1 Tags: So, what are these anyways? H1 tags are the heading tags which appear on your webpage which tells Google the most important headings for your pages. Your H1 tags need to have your search term in them.

4. Bolding: Is bolding important in On Page SEO? In fact it is a piece of the search engine algorithms which is taken into consideration. Is it the most important? No. Will it help you to rank. Yes. It contributes. Make sure to use bold on search terms that appear on your web page. Bold and <strong> (this is a tag for the webpage that make text appear bold as well) are equal for use.

5. Description: Your website description is pretty important. If you look at our highest ranking result for the search terms we’re discussing for our website you’ll see the following text on Google: “The main Web Design forum area. There are forums below for lots of different topics, please choose the correct one for your thread. Also, please do not post any …” Look at the terms in that text. Use your search terms in your website description and Google will give you some affection for it (in the form of better rankings).

We’ll continue our description of On Page SEO in our next segment. Stay tuned!