In this third part, we’ll take a quick look at most of the other important factors to improve you score.

Let me remind you that each factor adds “points” to your final SEO “score” for each keyword, and that this sum is how well you do in the eyes of the search engines when it comes to search engine rankings.

The higher you compare to every other page, the higher ranking results will be; all things are equal.

Of course, on page SEO is just one part, and not even the largest part, of what decides the final search engine rankings one of the easiest for you to control and do.

Okay, let’s look at these final on-page SEO factors.

Ads-to-Content Ratio

If the search engines find too many ads on a page compared to the amount of content then they will withhold or subtract “points”; this was one of the reasons so many marketers (particularly bad ones) were affected by the Google “Panda update”.

Unfortunately, at this time, I don’t know what a good balance is but since Google feels that having ads in places people expect content to be hurts the page, they feel this annoys people (yielding a worse experience), you should stick to common places like the sidebar or use text links in the body of your content (which has always worked well).

How Fast Your Page Loads

Google, and I expect the other search engines, is now rewarding Web pages that load faster with bonus points which help lead to higher search engine rankings.

You’d be surprised at what can impact the load time.

Obviously, big, unoptimized images slow it down but the number of requests to a single domain, invalid HTML, use of table tags, big JavaScript files, the number of Web sites on a shared server and much more.

Fortunately, most of them you have some control over so you can make improvements if you need to. A side note, WordPress sites tend to run slowly just by their very nature although there are things you can do for them.

Check the Speed of Your Page Here

High-Quality Content

The search engines love high quality content because the people who use search engines love high quality content and the search engines have gotten better and being able to tell if the content is high quality.

You need to be creating only quality content that provides good value for the keywords you’re using.

This would include longer articles (no more of the 250 word articles that gave little to no value and just tried to trick the search engines), having good information that would be of value to the reader, make it easy and pleasant to read (no more one paragraph articles), providing other, useful ways to convey the information (charts, infographics, etc.), have your style match the expectations of your audience (if they expect informality be engagingly informal, if they expect an academic treatise be formal and academic), etc.

Use Different Modalities

The search engines like to see different “human–computer interaction modalities”.

That means have target different senses in different ways by having video, audio, photographs, graphics images, etc. (some day soon we’ll probably be able to add touch and smell modalities!)

So, try to include at least some pictures and graphics in your content. Videos are also excellent to add if you can, even if it’s just a YouTube video you didn’t create that’s on the subject of your article.

Optimize Your URLs

In part 1, we saw that it is helpful to have your primary keyword in the Web address but I only talked about the domain name part of the Web address; while technically not true, you can think of it as the part of the Web address before the “dot”, like Google is the domain name of google.com or Harvard is the name in hardvard.edu or StreetGuideToWebTraffic is the name of this Web site.

However, you’ll probably not get more than one keyword in that name but every Web page won’t be for that keyword, at least directly, they are usually much more specific.

For example, this Web site’s primary keyword is “web traffic” so I have it in the name “StreetGuideToWebTraffic” but this blog post is much more specific. SEO is a subset of web traffic and on-page SEO is a subset of SEO and this page’s primary keyword is “on-page SEO” which is not in the “domain name” at all.

However, if you look at the full Web address (technically called the URL) you’ll see it’s “http://streetguidetowebtraffic.com/blog/seo/optimizing-your-on-page-seo-2″ which contains the primary focus of the site, the sub-focus of SEO and the specific focus of the page “on-page-seo”.

This is good the people, easier to understand and remember, and therefore, the search engines like it.

So make sure your pages have the primary keyword in the full Web address by naming each individual page appropriately. Don’t use generic names like page12.htm or put in numbers, random characters and the like; of course, don’t cram the Web address with keyword either — you’re probably getting it by now that being natural is the key.

One side note, always use just one form of your Web address when you make links. By that I mean, don’t use www.YourDomainName.com sometimes and YourDomainName.com other times; it just dilutes your results.

In the worst case use the rel=”canonical” attribute, here’s a video where Matt Cutts of Google talks about it if you don’t know what it is:

Have Valid HTML

As I mentioned earlier, your page will load slowly if the programming code is invalid.

At worst it won’t display right but Web browsers do their best to try to properly display invalid Web pages but it makes them work harder and slows down the page loading.

The same is true of search engines, as part of them indexing your page they try to understand the code of the page (to find images, links, text, etc. and if the code is invalid they may not be able to figure out what’s what and either bypass your page, get it wrong or penalize you.

The easiest way to check this is go to the W3C Validator page and enter the address of your Web page; not it validates a single page not an entire site. It will check your page and give you a report of the results so you know where you need to fix things.

Unfortunately, easy systems like WordPress blogs rarely validate 100% because of all the parts created by different people (like WordPress itself, plug-ins, themes, even what you type and how WordPress interprets it).

Still validation is important to do and fix what you can, they fewer errors the better.

Don’t Over Optimize

One final tip, don’t over optimize.

Now, after two very long posts on optimizing you might think this is a weird way to end but the search engines understand that Web sites are done by people and that people are perfect so if they find everything perfect they’ll think it’s done by a machine (or a computer program in this case) and question the page.

So, as I’ve said again and again, be natural and don’t worry about doing everything or doing everything just perfectly.

Conclusion

And that’s it. Whew!

If you don’t understand something about on-page SEO after this 3 part series then I don’t know what else I can do

Let me give you a quick summary of this post, you’ll find a similar summary at the end of part 1 and part 2.

Keyword Density

For best SEO optimization put your keyword phrase(s) in the content of your Web page.

Aim for a keyword density of at least 2% and no more than 5 or 6% but don’t obsess about it, make the content excellent and make sure read well and include your keywords where it makes sense; this will usually get you into that range anyway and improve your on-page SEO score.

Position of Keywords

For best SEO optimization put your keyword phrase in the first and last paragraphs of your Web page, as well scattered throughout the content; try to get the primary keyword phrase in the second and third paragraphs also.

You can do the same with any secondary keywords you have for the Web page but keep the flow of the content as readable and natural as possible, don’t force keywords into the content at the expense of quality and clarity.

Links to Trusted Sites

For best SEO optimization add a few links out to trusted authority sites in your Web page; however, don’t overdo this (2-3 in a 500-750 word article) and make sure they are not “nofollow links”.

Links to Untrusted Sites

For best SEO optimization have few or no links out to untrusted or distrusted sites in your Web page and make sure they are “nofollow links” when you do have them.

Link to Your Own Pages

For best SEO optimization add some links to other pages on your Web site but, like all the other advice, don’t overdo this; have a least one but don’t have more than 2-3 in a 500-750 word article — by the way, since you trust yourself make sure they are not “nofollow links”

Ads-to-Content Ratio

Don’t put too many ads on the page so that it overwhelms or even intrudes on the content, and try to keep the ads where people expect them like in a sidebar or footer, or use text links inside your content.

How Fast Your Page Loads

Try to get your pages to load as fast as possible, test how fast you page loads here:

High-Quality Content

You need to be creating only high quality content that provides good value for the keywords you’re using; that includes longer articles, having good information, and easy and pleasant read providing different ways to convey the information, and match the expectations of your audience.

Use Different Modalities

So try to include at least some pictures and graphics in your content. Videos are also excellent to add if you can, even if it’s just a YouTube video you didn’t create that’s on the subject of your article.

Optimize Your URLs

Make sure your pages have the primary keyword in the full Web address by naming each individual page appropriately.

Have Valid HTML

Having valid programming code on your page is important, check your own page here.

Don’t Over Optimize

Don’t do too much, be natural and don’t worry about doing everything perfectly.

Google has a Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide you can read and download; it’s always valuable to get information from an authority even if they may also have some self-interest.

I hope you take the information in this series and use the search engine optimization techniques to improve your on page SEO and your search rankings. If you have any questions, suggestions, or other comments please leave them below.
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This post from: Street Guide to Web Traffic. To read more post like this, head over to Street Guide to Web Traffic

Optimizing Your On Page SEO, Part 3

This second part we’ll look at most of the other important factors to improve you score; remember that you can think of it as each factor adding “points” to a total score for each keyword and that the sum of those points is how well you do in the eyes of the search engines.

The better you do, the higher ranking results you’ll get if all things are equal; I add that last part because on page SEO factors are just one part of the ranking and not even the most important part but one of the easiest for you to control and do.

Most of the talk about on-page SEO is centered around keywords, and rightly so, because proper use of keywords are the largest single factor in having a good SEO score. However, other very important factors are things like the quality and value of the content and the total user experience, so don’t neglect those.

Okay, let’s get down to it and look at other on-page SEO factors.

Using Keywords in Your Content

Since the search engines read your page to try to figure out what it’s about so they know what searches should show your pages, you need to have your primary keyword phrase in your content as well as any secondary keywords you’d like the page to rank for.

And it makes sense, if your page rarely or never has the phrase in it, why would Google and the other search engines think your page is about that keyword phrase — even if you have it in the title and meta keyword tags; remember never use keywords in titles, headings, or meta tags if you don’t use them in the content and vice versa.

There is some argument over whether to create a Web page for each keyword phrase or if you can combine multiple keywords in a single page…

Based upon what I’ve seen it really comes down to two questions? If you can answer yes to both then having a page use multiple keywords is okay, of you answer no to either of them then stick with one keyword phrase; the questions are:

1. Would somebody who is looking for, and interested in, your primary keyword phrase also be interested in and looking for (at this time) the secondary keyword phrase?
2. Would it appear natural, complementary and cohesive to combine two or more keyword phrases?

Most of the time I find you can use more than one keyword phrase and get rankings for both of them from the same article. Just be sure not to use too many keywords; too many is relative, of course, and depends upon the niche, the topic, the length of the content and things like that — use your best judgment but err on the side of using too few keywords rather than too many.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is just a fancy phrase for the percentage of your content that is made up of keywords; that is, the number of times your keyword appears in the content divided by the number of words in the content.

For example, if a keyword appears 23 times in a 500-word article then take 23 and divide it by 500 which is equal to .046 or a keyword density of 4.6%; some people calculate a multi-word keyword phrase as one word and others calculate it as however many words is in the phrase (therefore, a 2-word phrase appearing 23 times would count as 46 words and the keyword density would be 9.2%).

Fortunately, this is another easy way to improve your on-page SEO score, just repeat the keyword phrase a number of times throughout your page but don’t do it too much.

Position of Keywords

Of course, you want to have your keywords scattered throughout the body of your content and fit in naturally, however, there are some places you want to make sure you have keywords.

In part 1, we talked about having keywords in the heading tags but you’ll also want to make sure your primary keyword phrase in the first paragraph and the last paragraph.

I also like to try to have the primary keyword phrase in the second and even third paragraph if it makes sense and flows well. This really solidifies in the “mind” of the search engine that the Web page is about the keyword phrase.

You can do the same with secondary keywords if you’re using them, but it’s less important.

Links in Your Content

Nowadays, search engines look for links in your Web pages and count them towards your on page SEO score, either positively or negatively.

This is true for both links to other pages in your Web site and links to other Web sites.

Links to Trusted Sites

In the past, the search engines liked to see links from sites they felt were trusted or authority sites to your Web site; Google used their PageRank as a rough guideline to decide how well they liked the site, with higher numbers being better than lower numbers.

While that’s still important the search engines have started giving “points” for links from your Web site to trusted/authority sites; these are called trusted external links.

Their thinking is that if your content links out to trusted sites then it’s more likely that the quality of your content and Web page is better.

Don’t think though that you can just add a hundred links to a Web page to authority sites and you’ll zoom to the top of the search results because that is completely wrong.

Not only are there many other factors that decide where you are ranked if you put in too many links from a Web page the search engines will look very unfavorably on the Web page and downgrade it so you’re worse off than if you had no links.

Nobody, except maybe a few people at the search engine companies, knows the perfect number but I’d recommend no more than 2 or 3 in a common 500-750 word article.

It’s good to make sure these links are not “nofollow links”; read the Wikipedia discussion on no follow links  here or the Google explanation with video here.

Also, try not to always link to the same trusted site with every link, have some variety (like above I linked to 2 different trusted sites).

Links to Untrusted Sites

The exact opposite is that you should not have many, if any, links out to untrusted sites; these are called untrusted external links.

Of course, this can be hard because maybe 0.1% of the site on the Internet are trusted (I made up that number and if anything it’s too high); actually this can’t hurt unless you have a lot of them but don’t be needlessly sending people away from your Web site.

Even worse is links out to sites that are distrusted, these will have a negative effect in your on-page SEO score and you’ll end up with a lower search engine ranking.

For all these untrusted and distrusted links you should make the links “nofollow links” to let the search engines know that you particularly don’t trust them either but they may have some value.

Link to Your Own Pages

The search engines like to see links to other pages on your Web site from a Web page; these are called internal links.

They like this inter-site linking because it helps them understand the Web pages (the assumption being that it links to something related), it helps them understand the other Web pages, and it helps them understand the overall structure of your Web site. It also helps your readers navigate which is a great benefit on its own but the search engines like it when you make a better user experience for the people they send to your site.

However, the way that your Web site links to itself is also important; search engines like text links because they are understandable to them, that is, they contain context from the words of the link, whereas a graphic that’s a link provides none of that information so they don’t add value (see the alt tag section of part 1).

Also, the best links are links within the content of your Web page rather than in the menus or side bars or footers or anywhere else.

As you may know or guessed from a couple of paragraphs ago, the words you use for the link should be keywords of the page you’re linking to; this also helps the page you’re linking to because the search engines have a better idea of what it’s about.

For example a link with the words “click here” is worse than a link with the words “read part 1 of on-page SEO”.

One more thing about the words of the links — this is commonly called the “anchor text” — is that the latest Google updates made it so you should vary the anchor text of links so that it isn’t always the primary keyword you’re focusing on.

This is true with link that are on your own Web pages as well as links elsewhere that links to your pages.

The old recommendation was to always use the same anchor text but the search engine feel it’s not natural to always use the same anchor text so mix it up a bit while still including your keywords like I did above in the “read part 1 of on-page SEO” and even once and awhile use something completely different, even that “click here” would be fine.

Conclusion

This blog post focused on keywords and links within the content of your Web page; whereas part one focused on the various tags,

Let me give you a quick summary of this post, you’ll find a similar summary at the end of part 1.

Keyword Density

For best SEO optimization put your keyword phrase(s) in the content of your Web page.

Aim for at least 2% and no more than 5 or 6% but don’t obsess about it, make the content excellent and make sure read well and include your keywords where it makes sense; this will usually get you into that range anyway and improve your on-page SEO score.

Position of Keywords

For best SEO optimization put your keyword phrase in the first and last paragraphs of your Web page, as well scattered throughout the content; try to get the primary keyword phrase in the second and third paragraphs also.

You can do the same with any secondary keywords you have for the Web page but keep the flow of the content as readable and natural as possible, don’t force keywords into the content at the expense of quality and clarity.

Links to Trusted Sites

For best SEO optimization add a few links out to trusted authority sites in your Web page; however, don’t overdo this (2-3 in a 500-750 word article) and make sure they are not “nofollow links”.

Links to Untrusted Sites

For best SEO optimization have few or no links out to untrusted or distrusted sites in your Web page and make sure they are “nofollow links” when you do have them.

Link to Your Own Pages

For best SEO optimization add some links to other pages on your Web site but, like all the other advice, don’t overdo this; have a least one but don’t have more than 2-3 in a 500-750 word article — by the way, since you trust yourself make sure they are not “nofollow links”

Now, take the information in this and in part 1 and start to improve your on page SEO and your search rankings. If you have any questions, suggestions, or other comments please leave them below.

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This post from: Street Guide to Web Traffic. To read more post like this, head over to Street Guide to Web Traffic

Optimizing Your On Page SEO, Part 2

In short, SEO is how you get your Web site high up in the search engine results; getting onto page one and, more importantly, the top 2-3 positions which will get you a lot more traffic.

One aspect of SEO is the actual pages of a Web site; this is called on-page SEO.

There are certainly rules that Google and the other search engines follow when they look at your pages.

Essentially they have a scoring system somewhat like the Olympic figure skating or gymnastics scoring in that they look for certain things on your pages and give you “points” for having certain things on your page and the better job you do on those things the higher your score will be.

On-page SEO is an important aspect of SEO although it isn’t the most important factor. It’s more like “style points” that will give you extra credit to put you above your competition.

It’s also the easiest part of SEO, something that is in your control and doesn’t take much time and effort.

Let’s look at the different aspects of SEO one by one and see what to do and what not to do…

As part of my business, I am in the process of building an SEO optimization WordPress plug-in for my blogs. While there are others out there I found them inflexible and incomplete so I thought I’d build my own.

To do that properly I really needed to go through my own SEO processes and make sure — through research and testing — that I verified and discovered what on-page SEO is working today; not a bad thing to do even without the need to but them in the software and something I do periodically.

Your Web Site Address

This is definitely an important part of on-page SEO, some people rank this as the most important aspect although I’m not sure I’d go that far.

What it means is making sure you use your primary keyword in your Web address, for example, if your primary keyword is “inexpensive destination wedding” then you’d want to get InexpensiveDestinationWedding.com or InexpensiveWeddingDestination.com as your Web site address.

Remember to use your primary keyword if possible, if not, then use one of your best secondary keywords. Some other alternatives are:

• Use hyphens, for example, I could use Inexpensive-Wedding-Destination.com
• Use other top level domains. Those are the letters after the period like .com or .net or .co, etc.
• Add words to your primary keyword if applicable. For example, if your primary keyword is Harley Davidson Motorcycle but you can’t use HarleyDavidsonMotorcycle.com because someone else has it then try BestHarleyDavidsonMotorcycle.com, GetHarleyDavidsonMotorcycle.com, HarleyDavidsonMotorcycleGuide.com or whatever makes sense in your situation (look at your secondary keywords or even broader keywords that are related).

One reason why the search engines like this is because a domain name is static, that is, it can’t be changed. Therefore they assume that the name is very representative of what the Web site and Web pages are about.

It will help you get rank a little faster and a little higher but it is just one of many factors; remember each thing earns “points” so you want to have as many of them as possible.

Web Page “Tags”

Tags are internal Web page programming that your Web browser — Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc. — uses to display a Web page.

There are lots of different tags but only some of them are used by the search engines when calculating your on-page SEO score, let’s look at them.

Title Tag

The title tag is a special tag used to display the “name” of the page up in the Web browser’s title bar. Here’s an example of the name of a Web page that was in a title tag.

Using the title tag in on-page SEO

Internally in the Web page programming code it would look something like:

<title>Marketing Graphics Monthly | Free Marketing Graphics with a Bronze Membership</title>

This is a important tag when getting traffic for two reasons: (1) because the search engines use the words in the title to help it decide what the page is about (you get points for they keywords in your title) and (2) because this is main thing people will see in the search engine results.

Based on the title tag it could be assumed, if they are doing good on-page SEO, that they are using “Marketing Graphics” or “Marketing Graphics Monthly” as a primary keyword and it looks like “Free Marketing Graphics” is a secondary keyword.

When I do a search for that I see these results:

Matching On Page SEO to Search Engine Results

You can see that the title as defined by the title tag is shown in the search results.

As an aside, since I have an involvement in the above Web site I know a bit about what’s being done and those are indeed keywords that are being targeted.

You’ll also note that multiple keyword phrases are being used that were separated by what’s called the vertical bar or pipe symbol; this is usually used to save characters and make the phrases visually separate – I’ve heard some people say that some search engines stop if you use the word “and” but I don’t know if that’s true.

Meta Tags

There are 3 primary meta tags you’ll want to use in your Web pages: the description tag, the keywords tag, and the robots tag.

The description tag is used to describe, in 2 or 3 sentences, what the page is about.

Put the keywords in the description if you can, although the search engines don’t really use the meta tag much anymore except to display in the search results underneath the title and the Web address.

Internally in the Web page programming code it would look something like:

<meta name=”description” content=”[*Describe your page in a couple of sentences*]”>

Usually, if you don’t enter a description, the search engine will take the first words it thinks are text on the Web page; this may or may not be right and usually isn’t as you can see from the examples above.

Keep it simple and make the meta description tag be different and specific to each Web page.

The keywords tag was originally meant to provide the search engine with keywords that describe the page but it was so abused by marketers (including but not limited to spam marketers) that the search engines generally ignore them in most cases particularly is you use a lot of keywords.

Internally in the Web page programming code it would look something like:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”[*Put in your list of main keywords*]”>

Use just your most important keywords (both the singular and plural) so that if they are used they will carry a lot of weight.

One caveat, if you use words that are not related to the Web page (really they should be on the Web page also) then the search engines will think you’re trying to trick them and, at best, ignore them and will certainly deduct “points” and maybe even not index your page or ban your site.

The robots tag is really a tag to tell the search engine to look at a file that is not part of the Web page and see if you want to Web page indexed or not.

Internally in the Web page programming code it would look something like:

<meta name=”robots” content=”[*Either the word index or noindex*]”>

Use “index” inside the content= part if want the page indexed and use “noindex” if you don’t want it indexed; the default is index so you generally don’t need to use it, just use noindex for pages you don’t want indexed.

This is good to stop the indexing of pages like maybe your disclaimers or a page where you let someone fill our a form to contact you or any other page that really doesn’t help you by being in the search engine results – hey, why compete with your own non-content pages!

Other On-Page Tags

There are other tags you should use to help your on page SEO: heading tags, alt tags, and some formatting tags.

There are actually 6 different heading tags (1 through 6) but the best ones are the first 3. They are used to be like chapter title in a book or section title in an article or other document.

Internally in the Web page programming code it would look something like:

<h1>Best Inexpensive Wedding Destinations on Each Continent</h1>

<h2>Best European Wedding Destination: Tallinn, Estonia</h2>

<h3>Best Wedding Hotel to Stay At: Domina Inn Ilmarine</h3>

Here’s an example of a heading 1 tag in use:

Example of Using a Heading 1 for On Page SEO

Here’s an example of a heading 2 tag in use:

Example of Using a Heading 2 for On Page SEO

Each greater number in a heading means the words are smaller, so heading 1 is bigger than heading 2 which is bigger than heading 3 and so on.

There is something called alt tags but they really aren’t tags at all, just attributes of the image tags that let a Web page show an images, pictures and graphics.

Internally in the Web page programming code it would look something like:

<img alt=”Get all the marketing graphics you’ll ever need” height=”250″ src=”http://marketinggraphicsmonthly.com/images/Banner-250×250.gif” title=”Be a Gold Member” width=”250″ />

That is the programming code I took from the above graphic image that says “Never Buy Graphics Again”, note the alt attribute inside the tag it says “Get all the marketing graphics you’ll ever need” and has the marketing graphics keyword in it.

Put your important keywords in the alt attribute of your images but don’t always use the same keyword and don’t use in the same way.

The above usage is a good usage because other images on the page are unlikely to say exactly “Get all the marketing graphics you’ll ever need” but the keyword is naturally placed in the sentence; that’s what you want to strive for, using your keywords in a natural way.

Formatting tags are tags specifically designed to modify the look of the text on the Web page: these are the bold or strong tags, the italics or emphasis tags, and the underline tag.

Internally in the Web page programming code it would look something like:

<b>This is bold text</b> — here’s an example

<strong>This is bold text also</strong> — here’s an example

<i>This text is italicized</i> — here’s an example

<em>This text is italicized also</em> — here’s an example

<u>This text is underlined</u> — here’s an example

Put your important keyword phrase inside this formatting to tell the search engines that the phrase is special or, in fact, important; the search engines will use this in their scoring.

Wait… There’s More

This is quite long already so I’ll end here and continue in part 2 but here’s a summary of doing proper on-page SEO.

Web Page Address

For best SEO optimization, put your primary keyword phrase in your Web address or at least one of your most important keyword phrases.

One tip though when you select this, be sure to check that nobody has had the domain name previous and had it blacklisted — maybe because it for spam or illegal purposes; check it out at Archive.org.

Title Tag

For best SEO optimization, you want your keywords in your title tags but stay in the 40-50 character range and anything over 60 is too much.

Description Meta Tag

For best SEO optimization, you want to write a short meaningful description for the searcher that includes your keywords but stay in the 150-200 characters range, many people recommend no more than 160 characters.

Keywords Meta Tag

For best SEO optimization, list your main keywords (make sure they are in the content as well) but you want no more than about 100 characters.

Robots Meta Tag

For best SEO optimization, use the “noindex” content value on every page that you don’t want the search engines to index.

Heading Tags

For best SEO optimization, you should have at least 2 or 3 heading tags with your keywords in the tags, also don’t just use all the same tags.

Interestingly enough, in my research and testing I found the heading 2 and 3 tags to be the best followed by the heading 1 tag

Alt Tags

For best SEO optimization, put SEO-optimized alt tags on all applicable images, that is, images that mean something to the content or like above in the ad. Don’t put them on little arrows, navigation, or other things that don’t have to do with the topic of the Web page.

Also, use different keywords (not always your primary keyword) and vary the text of the alt tags while keeping the keyword phrase the same.

Formatting Tags

For best SEO optimization, put your keyword phrases inside the formatting tags but do this sparingly. If you format every keyword not only will it look (and rather amateurish) bad to the reader but the search engines will see that and take away points.

This should help you understand how to do on-page SEO that actually helps you, don’t miss part 2 of Optimizing Your On Page SEO.

If you have thoughts, ideas and your own on-page SEO suggestions, please leave them in the comments below.

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This post from: Street Guide to Web Traffic. To read more post like this, head over to Street Guide to Web Traffic

Optimizing Your On Page SEO, Part 1

This time we’re going to expand on that and look at how to take it to the next level and see how to use powerful content sharing sites to build the main structure of an Ultimate Free Traffic Network.

The number of very high quality back links and how quickly you can improve your search engine results positioning is amazing and this is the real secret to the strength of the traffic network.

There are a large number of content sharing sites, including the article directories we looked at last time, but there are some that are head and shoulders above the others, ones that you must include in your Free Traffic Network.

There is only one place to start is when adding your first content sharing site after you’ve established your article marketing process.

Squidoo

While Squidoo is one of the many innovative Web 2.0 sites you can use to get some extra traffic to your Web properties, it stands above most others by its quality and by the authority that the search engines give it.

If you don’t know what Squidoo is, it’s a site that lets you easily create special Web pages called a lens; while similar to blogs, usually these focus on a specific subject, and a great thing is you don’t need any expertise to create a “lens” on Squidoo.

As a content-sharing site Squidoo was created as a way for people to share their knowledge, opinions and expertise.

The key is understanding how creating Squidoo lenses can help you.

Benefits to Creating Squidoo Lenses

Creating lenses has a number of benefits particularly in regards to building traffic.

1. Market to Niche Audiences

A primary benefit of creating Squidoo lenses is it is a great way to promote yourself and your products and services to your niche marketplace.

This generates traffic directly to your lenses and indirectly to your other Web properties.

2. Focusing on Your Niche

Creating a proper marketing Squidoo lens really forces you narrow down your focus when creating content.

A common problem people have is that they try to be broad in their writing or they have keywords but don’t focus the article on them.

The entire process of creating a lens can help organize your thoughts and keep you focused on the single topic being written about.

This focus improves your traffic results for your niche and keywords.

3. Get Google’s Love

Squidoo has “juice”, that is, their pages will rank high more easily than pages on regular sites; of course, that is only true if you have words on your lens.

When you do searches you’ll see that Squidoo lenses usually appear ahead of other social bookmarking and content sharing sites.

So , when creating a lens you would target specific keywords that are related to your niches and products. When you make your lenses you add your keywords (tags) throughout to help the search engines and to bring in more traffic.

4. Testing Keywords

By choosing and putting keywords into your Squidoo lenses you can actually test your keyword phrases to see how popular they are and how music web traffic you can get.

Just create your lenses and then look at your statistics to see how it does.

With Squidoo you can see which of your lenses is the most popular. This can be eye-opening when it comes to discovering searchable and popular topics.

Analyzing your results and making modifications as necessary will show you which keywords the ones that are bringing you the most traffic.

5. Ideas for More Lenses

The sheer process of creating a Squidoo lens will cause you to come up with new ideas for additional lenses; I usually get at least one new idea and frequently several.

Of course, those additional lenses bring more traffic and bring more ideas!

6. Creating Quality Back Links

Because of the keyword focus on specific topics and the authority of Squidoo when you link your lenses to your other Web properties they get very high quality back links which gives them more power and more traffic.

As a nice side benefit , Squidoo gives you greater exposure and helps establish you as an expert.

How to Create Squidoo Lenses

To create a new lens you log into your account and click the link to make a new lens.

Then, to make the lens, you put together the various Squidoo modules onto one complete whole.

Each section of your article is put in a text module, with an appropriate heading, then add any other modules, that are appropriate, to your lens and publish it.

There a number of module types you can use, some you particularly want to consider are:

• Amazon: allows adding related Amazon products
• Del.icio.us: this module will automatically display your Delicious’ed links on your lens.
• eBay: this lists your auctions based on your tags or list specific eBay items you want to show on your lens.
• Featured Lenses: this module allows you to display the introduction modules of up to five lenses per module, creating a sort of a “lensography” of your (or other) lenses.
• Introduction: this is where you introduce your article/lens (required)
• Link Lists: this allows you to easily add lists of links
• YouTube: this allows you to add related YouTube videos to your lenses
• Poll: this allows you to add a poll to your lens
• RSS: this allows you to add your RSS feeds to your lenses (highly recommended)
• Text: this is where you place the text of your article (required)
• Text List: this lets you easily add lists to your lenses
• Plexos: this is available for various other modules like a Amazon, Flickr, text links and YouTube and  allows your readers to vote on your which items in the module they like best

Squidoo Terminilogy

Squidoo has some of its own language and terms you should know:

• Dashboard: this is the place where you can adjust your settings and check your statistics
• Lens: a Web page created on Squidoo (by a Lensmaster)
• Lensmaster: a person who creates lenses is a lensmaster.
• Lensrank: the numerical position your lens has when compared to all other published lenses.  Similar to a popularity rating, your Lensrank can change on a daily basis and it based on a wide variety of factors.
• Module: components that you can add to your lenses to give them unique features and content.
• Publish: when you’ve finished a lens you need to publish it so Squidoo will index it and make it available on the Internet
• Squid: a member of Squidoo
• Squidcast: a message that you can be send to your fans
• WiP: stands for Work in Progress, and means a lens that is still being worked on but has not been published or indexed by Squidoo.

Google’s “Squidoo Slap

There has been some concern about the importance of Squidoo because of the “Squidoo Slap” Google did to Squidoo Lenses.

Basically Google sent a message to Squidoo by “punishing” them and their lenses with bad (or no) rankings, even for many lenses that had high ones.

Like all “slaps” this was Google’s way of saying “we want good and relevant content and since some of your lenses are spam and porn and just sales pitches we’re penalizing you until you clean your act up.”

Seth Godin, the creator of Squidoo, is one of the world’s best marketers and Squidoo quickly and effectively made some rule changes that are very positive changes for themselves and for you as a marketer; and it made Google happy.

These changes benefit you because now you aren’t competing with the more unethical or unsavory people and your lenses will get the power of Squidoo while those people don’t get that advantage.

Also, Google may give even more power to this new and improved Squidoo giving you even better rankings for your lenses.

You can find out more about the changes, like the limited to the number of links and topics that you can’t create lenses about, by reading the messages on Squidoo or doing a Google search.

Conclusion

If you’re an Internet Marketer or have an online business and you aren’t using Squidoo, you need to start because you don’t realize what you’re traffic missing out on.

Squidoo is the number one Web 2.0 content sharing site in many ways including number one in driving traffic to your Web properties.

There are lots of benefits to creating Squidoo lenses to drive traffic, they include:

• Market to Niche Audiences
• Focusing on Your Niche
• Get Google’s Love
• Testing Keywords
• Ideas for More Lenses
• Creating Quality Back Links

Next time we’ll look at other content sharing sites and how to use them properly.

How has your ultimate traffic network coming?

Just remember, it’s all in the doing!

Please leave me a comment about what you’ve been doing or what you think about this series.

Talk soon,

David

The Shameless (Ethical) Marketer
http://www.Twitter.com/DavidHusnian
http://www.8-8-8Sale.com
http://www.MusicForInternetMarketers.com
http://www.SecretsOfGoogleAdWords.com
http://www.MadMondaySale.com
http://www.2ForTuesdaySale.com

O.Y. Don’t forget to retweet this! Use the button on the page or just Tweet this:
Content Sharing Sites, Squidoo: Ultimate Free Traffic Network, Part 8 at http://dahsu.com/6qeO8Pd (via @DavidHusnian)

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Content Sharing Sites, Squidoo: Ultimate Free Traffic Network, Part 8

Last time we talked about pay-per-click advertising and how quick and effective it can be when done properly.

But… that doesn’t mean you should stop there, not by a long shot. There is still money to be made using other tools in your traffic tool box.

One of those tools is search engine optimization, or SEO.

If there is an online marketing topic that causes more fights and arguments from people swearing by completely opposite methods and techniques I don’t know it is.

There are many aspects of SEO but one of the, if not the, most important ones is…
…the content of your site. It is a fact that having good quality content that is added frequently is a great way to appear higher in the search engine results.

Keyword Density

One thing that people tend to think of when talking about SEO is keywords and keyword density.

What keywords are is the specific words or phrases that you are targeting with an article, blog post or other text content.

You do this because when the search engine they create an index of your Web page or blog (like the index in the back of a book). Then when people search for a word or phrase they return those pages that have those words and phrases in their index for the page.

The simple definition of keyword density is the percentage of keywords in the entire page. That is, they divide the number of keywords found by the total number of words found and the answer, as a percentage, is the keyword density.

For example, in the last paragraph these are some keyword densities:

1. The word “keyword” or derivatives like “keywords” has a density of 10.26% (it appears 4 times out of a total of 39 words)
2. The word “density” has a keyword density of 5.13% (it appears 2 times out of a total of 39 words)

A more complex definition includes title, keywords, alt text, description, and comments.

There is some controversy over the proper percentage or even if keyword density is important anymore but, in general, I see people quoting in the 1.5-8% range.

The rationale behind it is that it helps the search engines understand the page and if the keyword density is too low they don’t understand it as well and, therefore, don’t rank the site as highly for that and related terms.

In truth, nobody really knows and you have a lot of people taking all the different sides because some been successful not using keyword density and others have been successful with double digit density.

To me, this just means that there are lots of other things being considered and it depends upon the combination and interaction of all those different things.

I figure, it can’t hurt to have some keyword density 2-5% but you should test to see if more or less works best in your situation.

Bottom line, there is no absolute best density to strive for and I believe there are a lot of factors so each case is different.

Links

Links are another major factor in having good SEO. In fact, they are probably the most important factor because getting some high quality links may be all you need to rank highly.

When I talk about links I mean other Web sites and blogs linking TO your site (inbound or back links) NOT linking from your site somewhere else (outbound links). A third type of link are links that are internal links, those that link from various pages of your Web site or blog to other pages of the same Web site or blog; these can have value also if you don’t just go wild – as is true will all links, have them be natural and make sense.

Google, in particular, uses inbound links as an important indicator to how good your site is. Originally, they were all about the quantity of links but then they changed and the quality of links is a more important factor.

Some good links from “authority sites” places like YouTube, Squidoo, and .edu sites ares worth far more than hundreds of links from the personal home pages of your family and friends.

If you look at the traffic plan I show in the previous post, The Traffic Pillar: 1 of the 3 Cornerstones of Guaranteed Success, you’ll see the network of links and the hierarchy being used.

It shows getting links from a variety of places, particularly a number of high quality sites.

The advantage of this is the search engines see a lot of links from those high quality sites and this helps raise the search engine results position (SERP) of your sites and blogs. You also get an addition advantage of those direct links from those high quality sites.

One note, lots of links from “link farms” and places with the same IP address range are generally considered to be bad and hurt your search rankings. Also, two way links where you link to a Web site and they directly link back to you doesn’t work well any more and can be damaging if over used.

So, don’t get one or two hosting accounts, put lots of domains on them and links them all together.

What Else Is There to SEO?

There are literally hundreds of different things different people do and insist are important. Go to a bookstore or look online and you will, similarly, find hundreds of books on the topic.

Instead of adding another voice to the confusion I want to just list many of the common factors I’ve heard.

I don’t necessarily endorse any of them and some of them I don’t even believe in but, like keyword density, I believe that successful SEO is a combination of numerous factors and you can make up for a lack of one thing but doing other things.

How else do you explain people having success with such a wide variety of different things some of which actually conflict with each other?

Okay, now to the list…

Content Related

1. Have lots of new, unique and valuable content
2. Keep the content focused on one topic
3. Don’t have a lot of duplicate content
4. Create a sitemap to help the search engines find all your important pages; create a Google XML sitemap also.
5. Start as early as possible, older sites and content are valuable

Keyword Related

1. Focus each Web page or blog post on one specific topic and keyword phrase.
2. Optimize for a primary keyword phrases but you can also optimize for one or two secondary, but related, phrases
3. Use the keyword tools (see my pay-per-click blog post http://streetguidetowebtraffic.com/blog/ppc/get-tons-of-traffic-with-ppc) to find popular keyword phrases; if you are selling something then make sure it is buyers that are doing those searches.
4. Use plurals, various verb forms, various spellings, synonyms
5. Keep related keywords together
6. Use keywords and keywords phrases in:
   • your title tag
   • your domain name
   • your page name or other parts of your Web address (use hyphens between words)
   • in your headlines
   • the keyword and description meta tags
   • the “alt” attribute of images on your site
   • the text of your internal and external links
   • the first paragraph and the top of your pages
7. Format your keywords to standout with font size and emphasis.
8. Don’t hide keywords by making them invisible
9. Keep keyword density within acceptable ranges, don’t “spam” the keyword phrases on your page (don’t create pages that are mostly links)

Link Related

1. Get links from authority sites and other high value sites
2. Get links from .edu sites as well as .gov sites (Google loves them)
3. Get linked in content specific directories like DMOZ and Yahoo!
4. Get links from other Web sites (just ask them!)
5. Get links from sites that focus on the same topic
6. Link naturally between pages in your site; don’t just link every page to every other page, have a natural flow.
7. Don’t use invisible links

Design Related

1. Try to use strictly HTML with little use of frames, Flash and content created with JavaScript
2. Have a broad, not deep link structure
3. Don’t have incorrect/bad HTML on your pages

There you have a good list of most of the important things to do or don’t do to achieve success in your SEO efforts.

As I said, nobody knows exactly how the search engines rank Web pages and I believe it is a combination

Always Test!

Think of all the different SEO things you can do as weights on a scale. You want the scale to be perfectly balanced so if you add to one place then you need to remove something else to keep the balance.

How do you find that out?

Test.

Add content, see what it does.

Add links, see what they do. Add different types of links, see what they do.

Play will all the factors and find which ones are optimal for your Web page or blog.

Always try find out why Google and the other search engines aren’t linking to you or ranking you highly, then fix it.

Conclusion

Search engine optimization can be a complex, ever-changing and frustrating task but if you have lots of good, fresh content and links from high quality sites then you are well on your way to being ranked on the first page.

Try out some of the many other factors and see how they impact your ranking and test and refine until you’ve got it perfect. Just remember that the rules change frequently so you’ll need to stay on top of it.

Just remember that this is area of online marketing that has lots of disagreements into what is the best way so keep skeptical of any claims but also open-minded enough to consider different ways.

What are your favorite SEO tips and tricks? Post them in a comment! Thanks.

Talk soon,

The “Shameless” (but “Ethical”) Marketer

http://www.8-8-8Sale.com
http://www.MusicForInternetMarketers.com
http://www.SecretsOfGoogleAdWords.com

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