• Tweet

• Tweet

Without search engine optimization, it’s not likely your web pages will be found in the search engines. Why waste time writing great content for your web pages if nobody’s ever going to find & read it?

It’s not often we give away search engine optimization knowledge to the public, but the weather’s got us in a great mood and we’re feeling very generous today so have decided to give you a little insight into optimizing your web pages for the major search engines such as Google & Bing.

Whilst we’re going to give you some great tips for better search engine optimization for your web pages, let’s not forget- to perform well in the search engines, your website must also be developed with the search engines in mind. When we develop a website for a client, we build everything around search engine optimization, because we strongly believe that a great looking website is pretty much useless if it can’t be found in the major search engines.

18 step search engine optimization summary

• Choose a keyword or keyword phrase that’s related to your content, and stick to it throughout your article
• Ensure the title of your web page uses the H1 tag
• Ensure the web page url contains your keyword or keyword phrase
• You should always use H1, H2, & H3 title tags within web pages
• H1 tag should contain your keyword or keyword phrase, and be linked to the current web page
• H2 tag should contain your keyword or keyword phrase
• H3 tag should contain your keyword or keyword phrase
• Ensure the keyword or keyword phrase is included in the opening sentence of your web page
• Ensure your page contains enough words
• Keyword density should be kept in mind when writing your web page content
• Bold one mention of your keyword or keyword phrase
• Italize one mention of your keyword or keyword phrase
• Underline one mention of your keyword or keyword phrase
• Include at least one image which contains an ‘ALT’ tag with your keyword or keyword phrase
• Include a link to another internal page on your website
• Use content-relevant ‘tags’
• Use the ‘nofollow’ attribute on any outgoing links
• Include your keyword or keyword phrase in the last sentence of your web page

There are in fact, roughly 50 different factors that we consider when publishing content for our clients, but the 18 listed above are enough to get you off to a great start with search optimization for your web pages.

A guide to better web page search engine optimization

Step 1 – Choosing a suitable keyword or search phrase

Always choose a keyword or search phrase which is related to your page content. You can use this free tool, provided by Google, to research specific keywords and search phrases: Google keyword tool.

Step 2 – Be sure to use the H1 tag for web page titles

The page title should always be using the H1 tag (This step also ties in with step 4).

Step 3 – Use a relevant url for your page

The web page url should contain your keyword or search phrase.

Step 4 –  Use heading tags

The use of H1, H2, & H3 title tags is essential for better search engine optimization. The h1 tag especially, should be descriptive of your article.

Step 5 –  Optimize your web page title

As per step 2, the title should always be using the H1 title tag. The H1 title of your page should also contain your keyword or search phrase, and be hyper-linked to its own page.

Step 6 – The H2 title tag

You should always include a H2 tag on your web page, and it should contain your search phrase or keyword.

Step 7 – The H3 title tag

As per step 6, but this time with the H3 tag. H4, H5, and H6 tags are also recognised by the search engines, but it’s quite rare that H5 & H6 tags need to be used.

Step 8 – Begin your article using your keyword or search phrase

To help the search engines to further discover what your article is about, you should place your keyword or search phrase within the opening sentence of your article.

Step 9 – Ensure your pages contain enough words

Whilst a web page containing thousands of words is probably never going to be read by anyone, too little words is not good practice. There is no ‘specific’ number that web pages require, but we recommend using roughly 500 words per article, when possible.

Step 10 – Maintain a decent level of keyword density

Keyword (or search phrase) density helps hugely when it comes to search engine optimization, so use your chosen keyword or search phrase often enough to ensure you maintain this high level of  density within your web pages. Don’t go too overboard however, search engines are intelligent and will pick up on things if you try to fool them- Eg. Don’t go using your keyword or search phrase thousands of times, thrown into random sentences within your article! In a 500 word article for instance, we’d probably use our keyword or search phrase (not including the use-age in H_ tags), roughly 10 times.

Step 11 – Bold one instance of your keyword

If you’ve stuck to what we explained in step 10, you’ll have used your keyword or search phrase enough times within your article to allow you to adhere to this step, and also to step 12 and 13. This is quite simple really- just include one instance of your keyword in bold.

Step 12 – Italize one instance of your keyword

Similar to step 11, but this time instead of bold, use italics.

Step 13 – Underline one instance of your keyword

Again, like step 11, but this time using underline.

Step 14 – Make use of the ALT tag on images

You should try to add at least one image to your web page, and make use of the ALT tag, like so:

alt=”Search engine optimization for web pages”

The text used within the ALT tag should contain your keyword or search phrase. Further search engine optimization tips about adding images to your pages are noted towards the end of this article.

Step 15 – Link to another page within your web site

If your website contains breadcrumbs, you can (if you wish) ignore this. It’s a good idea to link to elsewhere within your web site, such as back to a category, or perhaps to another related article. For instance; “why not check out our blog for further free help guides and tutorials?”

Step 16 – Use tags on your pages

If your website supports ‘tagging’, be sure to add relevant tags to each article you publish. If you look at the very bottom of this article, you’ll see some examples of tag use-age.

Step 17 – Don’t forget to use ‘nofollow’

On outgoing links, don’t forget to add the rel=”nofollow” attribute. Wikipedia contains a great article explaining the nofollow attribute and why you should use it; check it out here: Nofollow on Wikipedia.

Step 18 – Include your keyword in the last sentence of your web page

Not only do we advise you open a web page with your keyword or search phrase to help with your website’s search engine optimization; we also advise you end each page using your keyword (or search phrase) also- preferably within the very last sentence.

The search engine optimization bible

Fact is- there isn’t one! Search engines are always updating their algorithm and they do not tell people (even us web developers!) how to perfectly optimize a web site in order to grab that #1 spot. You’ll also find that most SEO professionals may share views on some aspects of search engine optimization (seo), but not on others. The points raised in this article are the views of TS Web Creations at the time of publishing. As previously mentioned earlier in this article, there are many, many, more factors to consider when it comes to search engine optimization – There are just some of the simpler ones that you can use as a rough guide when creating a new web page or adding content to your website.

Bonus tips – search engine optimization for images

Let’s not forget, the major search engines also allow you to search images using keywords or search phrases, so it’s important to optimize any images used on your website. Here’s a few helpers to get you under-way with image search engine optimization.

Images used on your web pages should:

• Have your keyword or search phrase in the filename. Eg. search-engine-optimization.jpg
• Have your keyword or search phrase in the ALT tag of your image, once embedded to your web page
• Have your keyword or search phrase in the TITLE tag of your image, once embedded to your web page

We hope this guide will be of use to you next time you’re adding a web page to your site. If you have any interesting thoughts or suggestions regarding search engine optimization, feel free to leave a comment below.