Simple Fool-Proof Strategies to Increase Your Search Engine Ranking Part 2: Making Your Website Relevant

This is a continuation of my do-it-yourself Search Engine Optimization series. On the first part of this series, I discussed that the first step to search engine optimization is doing your keyword research.

With many keywords related to your niche and literally hundreds of thousands or even millions of websites competing for those keywords, it's important to find not only the right keywords but the profitable ones and build your strategy around it.

Once you have determined your keywords, then you go to this on-site optimization which is making your website relevant.

If you would recall on the first part, I discussed that Search Engine Optimization has two phases: On site and off site. One is dependent upon another. Both must be accomplished.

The on-site search engine optimization can go as deep as making sure the codes on your website (especially the H1 and H2's) are properly placed. If you're using a content management system such as WordPress, this is really something that you don't have to worry about. WordPress is known to be search engine friendly.

Now, there are three areas that you have to take a look at when optimizing your website for search engines and they are:

1. Site Title, Site Description, Keywords
This particular section on your website is critical to getting ranked. This is the very first area that the search engine robots crawl for relevance.

When you type in a particular keyword, the meta title and the description are what shows on the search results. See image below. This is the ranking for my church web design business on the keyword "church web design." As you can see, out of 9,810,000 results, our website ranks #3 organically on a very competitive keyword church web design (without counting the sponsored links which are paid ads). I must know what I'm talking about search engine optimization then, eh? *Wink*

Now what's the key to making your meta title and description relevant? Incorporate the most important, most profitable keywords that you have based on your research. Craft it in such a way that it makes sense both for the search engines and the user/surfer.

Here are some guidelines when crafting your title and desription:
When composing, keep in mind that search engine robots will crawl from left to right so you must place the higher profitable keywords towards the left.

Title
The title is one of the most important factors in search engine optimization. This provides a very short summarized information about your website. Generally, it is 10-60 characters long. It can be longer than that, however, search engines will just ignore the latter parts if any.

Description
The description is just as important as the title. It should be less than 200 characters long and I would say that incorporating no more than 3 keywords is the key. More than that might be considered spamming and you might be blacklisted by the search engine robots.

How do you set the title and the description?

If you're using WordPress, you will click on General under Settings. You will see a couple of fields: Site Title and Tagline.
If you're using Joomla, you will go to Global Configuration under Site. There you will see Site Name and Metadata Settings which will have the description and keywords.
If your website is static and you have the HTML or PHP files as provided by your programmer or web development company. You will look for the index.html or index.php file and edit it with a text editor. In that you will see, a following similar code, edit it and replace with the applicable title, description, and keywords:
<head>
<title>Your Site Title Goes Here</title>
<meta name=description content="Your description goes here">
<meta name=keywords content="your keywords go here">
</head>

2. Page Titles and Permalinks (or Search Engine Friendly URLs)
Your homepage, although critical in search engine optimization, isn't necessarily the only important page when optimizing your website. In my honest opinion, search engine algorithms do calculate the relevance of the other pages on your website as well – it's overall total relevance to the keywords being entered by the searcher.

On WordPress, your blog posts titles are your page titles. Make sure to incorporate at least one important keyword on the title. To enhance the search engine friendliness of each of your blog post or pages on WordPress, I suggest installing All in One SEO Pack. In addition to the page titles, WordPress also allows you to set your URLs or permalinks to make it more relevant. For example: http://www.yourdomain.com/use-some-keywords-on-this-link. Search engines weigh the relevance of your URL as well.

Another very important setting that many fail to do on WordPress (in fact, I made this mistake at the beginning! grrr) is setting your permalinks to have it after your domain immediately and not go under subdirectories. This will have more weight if it's set to: http://www.yourdomain.com/your-blog-post-title-here-with-your-keywords RATHER than http://www.yourdomain.com/archive/month/whateverfolderhere/your-blog-post-title-here-with-your-keywords

To configure, go to Permalinks under Settings and set it to Custom and add the code /%postname%/

Basically, this code tells the system that it needs to use the title of your blog post as the URL.

If you're using Joomla as CMS, it allows you to configure each of your article with description and keywords under the Metadata Information. You may also need to install SEF URL plugin in order to make your URLs search engine friendly.

3. Actual Content
I was once asked while doing a webinar about optimizing blog posts or articles for search engines. Do you write with search engines in mind to make sure that you get organically ranked?

If you must know the truth, my blog is not all about being ranked high on certain keywords on search engines. In fact, I could probably care less about it. My goal when I started this blog is to provide a resource for entrepreneurs out there. My readers, my audience are humans and not robots. So I had a different strategy in promoting it.

When I write, do I consider keywords and being ranked high? One hundred percent of the time, NOT. I write with my heart and keeping the needs of my readers in mind. However, this is absolutely my personal preference. We each have different goals.

With that said, however, how do you optimize your content? There is a term in search engine optimization called "keyword density." Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or key phrase appears on a web page in comparison with the total number of words on the page. Many experts already believe this is a myth. My opinion is that you should never write the content of your page or blog and be too concerned about how often the words appear in it.

I like how Wiep Knoll of Wiep.net put it:

Instead of looking at keyword density, I think it’s better to focus on keyword presence. Make sure that you’ve put the keyword(s) you’re targeting in your page’s title tag, meta description and in the content part.

Don’t stuff in extra keywords just to get that magic 3,22% or 7,08% keyword density (or whatever percentage you’re aiming to get), but make it look natural instead.

To summarize, I would like to use Brett Tabke's (Webmasterworld.com) thoughts on search engine optimization:

If the keyword isn’t on the page – it isn’t going to rank well (or at all) for that keyword.
If the keyword isn’t in the title of the page, it is going to be tougher to rank for that keyword.
If the keyword isn’t in the url, the task becomes more difficult.
What about in a big header on the page?
What about high on the page, or strategically spaced throughout the document?

Additional thing that I would like to do is whenever I use images, I make sure I name the images with the relevant keywords.

Hope you learned something from this post! I will continue next with Part 3 which is the off-site optimization.

Please show me some love by liking, digging or retweeting! *Smiles!*

Until then!…