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I am going to experiment with posting a weekly Friday SEO tip.  These posts won’t be extremely long and they may range from tips most appopriate for SEO ’101′ to more advanced.  Please stop by every Friday to check out my newest SEO tip!

Search Rankings Require Content

You would be surprised by how many people expect to be able to rank for a certain keyword without it even being found on their website.  I won’t tell you that it’s impossible but why work any harder for your rankings then you have to?  There are several areas within page that you should include your keywords, below are several tips in order to best optimize your page for a specific keyword.

• Title Tag – Yes the big blue bar at the very top of this web page.  What is typed into this title tag is what will display within the search results.  Now don’t go spamming the hell out of your title tags because the search engines only display the first 70 characters and that includes spaces.  The search engines also give more value to the keywords located at the beginning of the tag.  With this in consideration place your keyword as close to the beginning of the title tag as possible.  A common mistake companies and organizations make is placing their business name in the front of the title tag.   If you find it absolutely necessary to include your company name, do yourself a favor and add it to the end of the tag.
• Header Tags - Specifically you should be placing your keyword within the “H1″ header.  Many SEO’s will debate the effectiveness of this tactic but it definitely hasn’t been proven to hurt your rankings so why not spend a couple moments and complete this task.  Regardless of whether you use a header tag or not its still important to add your keyword within the heading of your page.
• Content – Ideally the entire page would be devoted to what your keyword is.  Take for instance my review of the Google Analytics Individual Qualification Test Review. Do you see how multiple instances of the keyword is used within the content? Do you also notice how the content is written clearly and not spammy? Write your content for your audience, not the search engines.
• Image Alt Tags – If you’re planning on adding an image or two to your content piece consider adding your keywords to the alt text.  Once again you should do this if the images reflect the keyword and the content your writing about.

Remember that SEO isn’t an exact science but you as a webmaster has full control over the content on your website.  Part of the SEO algorithm values on page SEO elements so there should be no reason why your content isn’t perfectly optimized.  Link building is typically the most difficult portion of SEO and it’s because you don’t have full control over it.  Remember to take advantage of these tips the next time you target a keyword for a specific page.

Good Luck and Happy Rankings!

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