Here is a crash course on how to ‘set-up’ website pages for SEO.

A web page  title tag is important because search engines use it to as an indication of the theme of the page. The title tag should contain a keyword or two.  On the home page, starting the title tag with the company name is a good idea.  On inside pages, if the company name is used it should be towards the end of the title.

Meta Tags (description, keywords, etc) are now mostly ignored by search engines because Meta Tags were being manipulated and are often not an accurate indication of the content on the page. Search engines now have better analysis tools that determine true page content.

Keyword density of page content should be in the 3-7% range which search engines use to judge page subject matter.  Overuse of keywords (spamming) will reduce your page ranking.  

Multi-purpose websites covering many subjects are more difficult to optimize for a variety of  keywords on individual pages than a ‘micro-site’ type website focused on a few keywords.

Make sure of keyword prominence near the top of a page as early content carries more weight with search engines. And search engines only read a limited volume of text on a page. In long pages, keywords at the bottom are never read.

Header Tags on a page (H1, H2, H3) should be used as content headlines.  Headers are treated as important indicators of page content by search engines. So headers are more important than regular text if the header is an accurate description of the page content and is tied to the page keywords. 

Text that links to other pages in the same website via a hyper-link, sometimes referred to as anchor text, should include keywords. Don’t use terms like ‘click here’  or ‘more info’ because search spiders need clear guidance on where the link goes relative to link relevancy.  The same applies to the anchor text for incoming links to a web page.

There’s more, but if you do the above you will be doing many of the best practices for so called on-page actions. Off page actions are another subject.

The first step in SEO is keyword research. You need to use a database like Google’s Keyword Tool to find out what phrases (keywords) people are using to search for your ‘stuff’.  https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

The keywords you select intuitivly may be inappropriate or different than what people actually use.  Let’s say you sell shoes. Shoes is too broad a term to realistically do SEO around. You should do SEO for niche items (so called long tail items). And it helps if the item is not highly competitive (lots of competing web pages).

Men’s shoes and men’s dress shoes are also too broad and too competitive. But maybe you make a nice wingtip shoe.  Your intuition may tell you to do SEO around the term ‘nice wintips’ because that is what you call them.  Bad idea. There are no searches for the term ‘nice wingtips’ according to Google.

And there are practically no competitive web pages that optimize around ‘nice wingtips’ so you could easily achieve #1 ranking for that keyword phrase. But since no one is searching using that keyword, it would not get you a single lead. It’s like advertising butterfly nets to Eskimos; or worse yet – advertising nice butterfly nets. You would not have any competitors, but Eskimos are not looking for nice butterfly nets. Howver, fishing nets is another story.

A little research shows that the keywords like: black wingtips, brown wingtips, black and white wingtips, and even men’s wingtips have significant search volume and are not highly competitive terms. And make sure you research variations like mens black wingtips and men’s black wingtips as both get useful search volume.

So at the start of your SEO activity create or buy a keyword report that analyzes the breadth and depth of the possible keywords that are actually being used by people to search for your ‘stuff’. Then for best results, select keywords to do SEO around that have significant search volume, but are not highly competitive. You can go after competitive keywords, but that is a lot more difficult, time consuming, and will require a lot more content volume, social media interaction, and link building than most companies are able or willing to accomplish.

There is an old saying: “Beauty is only skin deep; it’s what’s inside that counts in the long run.” That of course refers to the true nature of a person versus how they look.

A website’s graphic design look and feel (header, navigation button links, graphics, color scheme, border designs, display methods, etc) is sometimes referred to as the website’s skin. The website’s content lives within the skin design.

The beauty is only skin deep saying applies to websites.  A search engine spider program that gathers information about a web page to use in the ranking algorithm is very limited in what it can read.  Don’t become obsessed with beauty over substance by overuse of Flash, Java script menus, image links, image maps, framed pages, and other make-it-pretty methods. 

Spiders can crawl (move around) and interpret text, but not Flash, images, or framed pages.  If the spider can’t navigate your website and can’t read your content, then you have sacrificed too much functionality for beauty.

The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity, and Reputation. A spider can not judge and score beauty.  That doesn’t mean a website needs to be plain or ugly to do well with SEO.  But a good guideline for website design relative to SEO is:  “Pretty is as pretty does.”

You worked hard and finally achieved high search engine ranking for some of your web pages. And then one day you notice you’ve lost those high rankings. What happened?

You used ‘white hat’ tactics so that is not why. You updated your website to keep up with the latest best practices so that likely is not why. Or is it?

If you lose high rankings, review the history of your website updates. Did you delete pages and add new pages? Did you change the content significantly on existing pages?  Perhaps you accidentally deleted a page that was well back-linked with what you thought was a comparable, better page? Or you changed content and accidentally deleted important Header tagged headlines or replaced the headline with something new. Or you altered the keyword density in the content. Or….

A web page that is ranked high is ranked high because of its content, Header headlines, and back-links. And longevity counts in rankings. When you update content or replace pages you risk destroying the things that created the high page rankings. Be careful what you delete and what you change or you might wonder; oops, how did that happen?