Alright,
the purpose of this lesson is to show you what I would do to
optimize a specific website. Often, I'm asked, "Brad,
what do I need to do to my website to make it rank high in the
search engines?". Well, pay close attention to this
lesson because I'm going to take a website at random and show
you exactly what I would do to optimize this website.
First,
we'll go to Google to find a website. I'll enter the search
term "toy trains" and hope that it'll bring us back
some possible websites that need to be optimized. This is the
keyword we're going to try to rank well for.
Ok,
after doing this, I'm going to look in the right hand results
of Google (Adwords). The reason I'm doing this is because those
websites are typically websites that aren't optimized very well.
They are websites that are simply paying Google to be located
in those positions.
Ok,
you'll see that I have an arrow pointing to "www.train-yard.net".
This is the website that we're going to optimize.
Onpage
Ranking Factor Changes...
The
first steps we'll take are to optimize all of the "onpage
ranking factors". If you don't know or remember what those
are, refer back to lesson 2, I believe...
You'll
notice that this website does not include the keyword
"toy trains" in the title of the page. It's current
title is "Train Yard". So, what we'll want to do is
change the title of the page to: Toy Trains
The
.html code you would use to do this is: <title>Toy Trains</title>
If
we click the "view" link in the menu bar of Internet
Explorer, then click "source", we can have a quick
look at the .html code that makes up this website. Now, you
don't need to understand html to change or add meta tags. Once
we've clicked the "source" menu option, we'll see
a textfile that contains all of the code that makes up this
site
What
we want to look for is their meta "keyword" tag, and
their meta "description" tag.
You'll
notice that when viewig the source code of this website, they
don't even have meta keyword and meta descriptions tags!
They're using something that says "<meta content="blah
blah, blah blah... and blah">"
Now,
I'm not sure what this actually is. It's definitely NOT
a type of meta tag that has any relevance to your rankings.
So, what we want to do is change that. We'll completely remove
ALL of the meta tags. These include:
-
<meta
http-equiv...>
-
<meta
name="generator">
-
both
<meta content> tags
Once
we've done this, we'll simply add a meta description tag, and
a meta keyword tag. This is what we should insert into our code:
<META
NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Toy Trains are our
specialty. We offer all kinds of trains and other toys to help
satisfy your needs.">
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="toy train,
toy trains,">
Now,
you'll notice a couple things.
I
mentioned the keyword "toy trains" once in the description,
and also each keywords separately in the description.
I
only included the plural and singular forms of the keywords
in the keyword tag. (This is because we're only optimizing our
webpage for 1 keyword. You should normally choose 2-3 keywords
per page, and you would just include those other keywords in
your tag as well.
Again,
we'll need to click "view" then "source"
within Internet Explorer. Once the code screen is open, you'll
want to click "edit" then "find" and search
for the text: h1. This is the html code used to enclose what's
called an h1 header tag. You should always include your main
keyword within an h1 header tag.
We
do this and can't find an h1 header tag anywhere on the page.
An h1 header tag would look like this:
<h1>Then
your keywords</h1>
Ok,
so what we need to do is add an h1 header tag. We'll
use the html code:
<h1>Get
Your Toy Trains Here</h1>
Once
we do this, our website will now look like this:
You'll
notice that I've replaced the previous text "Welcome to
the train yard" because that really wasn't serving a purpose
for the page, and have added the text "Get Your Toy Trains
Here", which does contain our targeted keyword. You'll
always want to place your H1 header tag towards the top of your
website. Preferably the top left hand portion of your page.
In this case, we just placed it in the top middle, which will
work just fine.
Ok,
next we want to add what's called an h2 header tag. We
do this exactly like we did with the h1 header tag. Except the
code to do this is:
<h2>Toy
Trains</h2>
I'll
add this tag below the picture. Your h2 tag should always come
after your h1 tag.
You'll
notice the h2 header tag above is:
"Limited
Time Sale On All Toy Trains" and includes our main keyword:
Toy Trains
The
code used for this is:
<h2>Limited
Time Sale On All Toy Trains</h2>
If
at all possible, if you can include ONLY your main keyword
in both the h1 tag and h2 tag, that would benefit you the most.
In our example, I added a few other words, but if you're creative,
you can figure out a sneaky way to add only your main keywords
to the header tags
| Bolding,
Italycizing, underlining |
This
is something you'll want to do as well. We'll now just go through
this webpage and add the keword "toy trains" throughout
the webpage. We'll also bold, italicyze, OR underline maybe
1 or two instances of the keyword. Don't go crazy with this.
Just make it look natural.
You'll
notice that this website has no alt image tags that contain
their main keyword "toy trains". The reason I know
this is because I clicked "view" then "source"
like we did above. I then did a search for the text: alt
The
only alt image tags that showed up were:
-
Train
Yard
-
Products
-
Contact
Us
-
Policies
-
News
What
we need to do is remove all of those alt image tags completely.
They don't really serve a purpose, other than diluting the effectiveness
of the alt image tag that we're going to add.
Ok,
if you go to the website and hover your mouse over the top graphic:
you'll
see that there isn't an alt image tag attached to this image.
How do I know this? Well, let's hover our mouse over an image
that I know contains an alt image tag.
I
hovered my mouse over the "Train Yard" image located
on the top left hand side. When I did this, a little popup message
came up that said "Train Yard". This is what an alt
image tag does. We know that this image has an alt image tag
that says "Train Yard".
So,
what we'll do is add an alt image tag directly to the BIG picture
located in the middle of the website. The picture of their store.
To do this, we'll just take their old code for the image, which
was:
<IMG
ID="Picture11" HEIGHT=200 WIDTH=320 SRC="./assets/images/TrainYard_Store_Front.jpg"
BORDER=0>
and
we'll add an alt image tag to this, by changing the code to
say:
<IMG
ID="Picture11" HEIGHT=200 WIDTH=320 SRC="./assets/images/TrainYard_Store_Front.jpg"
BORDER=0 alt="Toy Trains">
Notice
I've made the code I added, red. That's all there is to it.
Now, when you hover your mouse over the picture, a little popup
will appear that says "Toy Trains".
Moving
on...
Add
a link from each webpage within our website, that says "Toy
Train Home". This link should link back to our main page
using this link: http://www.train-yard.net
.
Note:
It should not link to: index.htm or index.html
For
example, we would click on the "products button" located
on the left hand side of the site.
This
would take us to this page: http://www.train-yard.net/html/products.html
On
this page, we'd add a link that points back to our homepage.
I'm going to add this link at the very bottom of the page, as
shown below:
We'll
do this with every single page within the website. The more
pages we can create for our website, the better we'll rank.
Next,
we'll add the keyword "Toy Trains" to the page title
of ALL of our other web pages. For example, we'll continue looking
at this page: http://www.train-yard.net/html/products.html
The
current page title is: "Products"
That
isn't a very good title to begin with... but what we'll want
to do is just add our main keyword to the beginning of the page
title. The new title of this page would be: Toy Trains: Products
We'll
do this for ALL of our web pages. This makes the search engines
see that our website is all about "toy trains" as
the page title is very important in the eyes of the search engines.
Now
that we've made those changes, I'm going to save the rest for
part 2 of this 2 part guide. :-)
In
part 2, I'll be covering a few more onpage optimization techniques
that we'll be incorporating into this website. I'll also dive
into the specifics of the offpage optimization that we'll be
performing.
Hope
this lesson was of some benefit, if anything, just as a reminder
and refresher as to what the very first steps you should take
when optimizing any web page should be.
Talk
to you soon,
Brad Callen
Professional SEO
http://www.seoelite.com
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