SEO Basics

Before you begin serious SEO you must ensure that your website is "search engine friendly". This means making sure that each individual page is compliant with search engine standards and ready to be indexed correctly. Follow each of the steps below for each page on your site.

Have your list of target keywords ready - you'll need to insert them into your pages.

Page Title

The title of the HTML page should be relatively short and describe the page content accurately. Wherever possible, try to include keywords (without distorting the true purpose of the title). For example:

<title>McGrath Discount Office Furniture Store</title>

Metatags

Use the description and keywords metatags in the head of each web page. Make these tags different on each web page.

<meta name="description" content="Suppliers of quality office furniture and accessories at discount prices.">
<meta name="keywords" content="furniture, office, store, shop, retail, discount">

Heading Tags

Use heading tags. Many search engines place more emphasis on text within heading tags, so make sure they use keywords. Use one <h1> tag per page with the most important keywords. Use other head tags (<h2>, <h3>, etc) to provide variations and support the main heading.

<h1>Desks</h1>
<h2>Large Desks</h2>
<p>... information about large desks...</p>
<h2>Small Desks</h2>
<p>... information about small desks, etc etc...</p>

Page Text

Make sure the text of your web pages contain keywords and common phrases which people might search for. Be careful with the frequency of your keywords - you want to have them occur at least a few times if possible, but don't repeat yourself so much that the copy becomes unnatural. The idea is to discretely spread keywords around without making it obvious.

<p>Buy office furniture at affordable prices from any of our retail stores.</p>

Remember that text contained within images won't be picked up by search engines. Only actual text on the page will be indexed.

Note:

Next Page: Inbound Links