Step-by-step seo information - beginners

With seo information it is important that you know there are two forms of search engine optimization: on-page and off-page optimization.  Off-page search engine optimization relates to the number and quality of external links pointing to your website.  (See PageRank)

On-page search engine optimization happens right on your own website.  These include factors such as using your keywords in the page title, h1 tags, strong (for bold) and Alt image tags, as well as whether or not your site has meta tags for both keywords and description.

The more of these that are included on your web page, the better search engine optimized it is.  If your competitors’ web pages are lacking these and, their PageRank is 5 or less, then you can “up-one” on them and beat them.

Study your opposition to see how well their web page is optimized.  You do this by looking at their Source Code.

For illustrative purposes, let’s visit Google, type “gardening” into the search box, and examine the Source Code of the top website on the results page – www.mygarden.net.au.  Click on its link to view the website, and then click the View menu and choose Source.  Here you will find all the ‘behind the scenes’ code for this site.

You are looking for:

• <title> tags for the page with the keywords within it eg <title>gardening plants and tips </title>.  In other words, have they included the keywords in their page title?
  
  Note:  An opening tag looks like <> and the forward slash in </> means closing tag - everything enclosed in between the two sets of tags is defined by that tag.
  
  
• <h1> tags with the keywords inside eg <h1>gardening plants and tips for your home</h1>, ie have they included the keyword in a h1 heading format?
  
  
• <strong> tags with the keyword inside eg <strong>gardening</strong>, ie are their keywords bolded anywhere?  The opening and closing <strong> tags make whatever’s enclosed within, bold.
  
  
• <em> tags (for italicizing) with the keyword within eg <em>gardening tips </em>, ie are their keywords italicized anywhere?
  
  
• <u> tags with the keyword inside eg <u>gardening tips</u>, ie are their keywords underlined anywhere?
  
  
• <alt> image tags.  Adding <alt> image tags to your website images not only provides alternate text for images for your vision impaired visitors, and also for those who turn off images when browsing on the Internet, but they also provide a handy way to add keywords.
  
  
• <meta> tags containing the keywords
  
  
• <meta> tags containing a description of your site and which include the keywords.
  
  
• Finally, have the keywords been used both at the very beginning and very end of the main, web page content?

The more of these that are included, the more difficult it will be for you to out-rank them because they know what they’re doing and have properly optimized their web page.  This is your true competition.

SEO Tips

To quickly locate the above tags simply hold Ctrl + F, type the tag you’re searching for eg <title> (or <h1>, <strong>, <em> etc) into the “Find” field, press Enter, and you’ll be taken directly to them – providing they are there in the first place.

If you’re planning on a keyword tool to automate the above workload, you might consider Keyword Elite.  Below is a screen shot showing how well optimized each of the top ranked websites are for the keyword "organic gardening".  All their relevant seo information is automatically collated for you at the click of a button.

As can be seen above, for each competitor Keyword Elite shows:

• PageRank
• How many words each web page contains
• How many repeats of the keyword are on each of the pages
• Keyword density calculation
• Number of times the keyword is in the page title
• How many links on each of the pages include that keyword
• How many times times the keyword appears in the Alt Image tag
• How many times the keyword appears in the keyword Meta tag
• How many times the keyword appears in the description Meta tag
• How many times the keyword is bolded
• How many times the keyword appears in header 1 tag (h1 tag)

Now you can see if the website owner optimized the site intentially or was their high Google ranking an accident.  Your next question would be whether or not you could do a better job and outrank them.

When you have gathered the seo information on your competitors for each of the keywords you’re considering, it’s time to sift through and note how many have: