One of the the most important parts of optimizing your website for search engines is to target a select few keywords that you would like to rank well for and sprinkle these terms throughout your pages and domain. A great tool to use when optimizing your site is seo-browser.com, this will allow you to view your site from a robot’s point of view and allow you to control how your site is recognized by search engines.

Domain, Page Titles & Permalinks

If you haven’t decided on a domain yet, keep in mind that having your keywords inside your domain is very good for SEO. For example if I’m a photographer living in New York city and would like to rank well for the term: nyc photography then having the domain name http://www.nycphotography.com would be perfect. Unfortunately many if not every popular/competitive term’s .com has already been registered, alternatively we can use the keywords within the domain by adding in other words (IE. qualitynycphotography.com) or use other available extensions than .com.

If you already have a domain you’ve been using or just want to stick with your business or own name within the domain for your website, then what I recommend is to build an interior page using your keywords as the permalink. For example on my own site I made the interior page http://michaelciccarelli.com/las-vegas-web-design/ since I would like to rank for the search term las vegas web design.

Since I use WordPress to power my websites/blogs there is a plugin that controls the Page Title and permalink of each page on your site called All In One SEO Pack. This plugin dynamically writes the Page Titles and permalink for each post/page your publish based on the title you assign to it within the Post/Page Editor.

Use of Headers (H1 tags)

If you’ve used the seo-browser tool I mentioned above you should now have a good understanding of what a “bare-bone” version of your website minus all images and styling looks to a robot/spider, who cannot see these items. The only significant different in the appearance of your content would be the different sizes in type. Although the report isn’t using any styling H1 tags are still the largest text seen and most prominent, while other headers, ordered lists, paragraphs and other basic text styling is still some-what supported.

Since H1 tags are viewed as ‘more important’ than the other content on your page to the bots, the text within your H1 tags should most definitely contain your desired keywords. This way you know your website is being associated in some way with your desired keywords and actually related to the search term. I like to have an H1 tag on each website I make containing the keywords I am targeting, followed by another heading (h2 or h3) containing a brief paragraph describing what the website is about and to use more keywords.

Maintaining your design while bettering it’s search engine presence.

If you’re design doesn’t call for it to have type displayed at the top of your website there are many styling tricks you can use so the mentioned headers and content still load first on your site while it might not appear so for the end-user. Some methods I’ve used in the past are:

The use of the Absolute position
Using relative and absolute positioning within your stylesheet gives you the ability to set the order of items within the code of your website to load an item first on the page but have it displayed at the bottom of your site, when loaded within a browser. The benefit of this is to maintain the look and design of your website while ensuring the important content is rendered first when spiders and bots crawl your page for search engines.

Javacript that will give the user ability to toggle between the visibility of content
Using a pretty simple jQuery drawer script you can include content to be loaded at the very top of your page, but not visible to a user browsing your site with a javascript enabled browser. This way the user has the option of clicking an “about us” link somewhere in the header that will display the once hidden content from the site. Since bots and spiders do not support javascript the content is not hidden from them and since the content is loaded at the top of the page this content is consider important and assuming your keywords are included should be very beneficial for SEO.

Anchor Text

Robots tend to look at hyperlinks as prominent content and from my experience I know it is important to use proper anchor text and populate the title tag. The following is a good example of a hyperlink you should have on each page of your website (and others) if you are trying to rank for the keywords las vegas photography:

<a href="http://somelasvegasphotograper.com" title="Las Vegas Photography">Las Vegas Photography</a>

Remember to use ALT and TITLE tags

Bots and spiders cannot read images therefor if you’re using images to display titles and headers on your site, it’s important to use the ALT and TITLE tags to images, so the bots know what the image is. Here’s an example of how a banner image, that includes the text We provide quality graphic design services, should be included on your page (so bots can pick up on what message the image is suppose to give):

<img src="http://yourdomain.com/banner.jpg" alt="We provide quality graphic design services" title="Graphic design services" />

Conclusion

In brief, some very basic optimizing can be done by simply including your keywords throughout the content of your website pages. Although you should not completely saturate your website with your keywords, since search engines may penalize you if they think you are trying to manipulate the bots, however a strong presence of your keywords can be proven very beneficial to your page rank.

Tags: anchortext, seo