"The Steps YOU Should Take To Optimize Your Own Website..."

SEO Power Strategies - Day 21

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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 "http://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...

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Page Title

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>

Meta Tags

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:

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.

H1 Header Tags

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.

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H2 Header Tags

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.

Alt Image Tags

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:

and we'll add an alt image tag to this, by changing the code to say:

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...

Adding Homepage Links

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.

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Web Page Titles

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
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