Search Page Optimization – Making Sure Your On Site Content Is Optimized for Search Engines

Today we’re going to give an overview of the latest tips on search page optimization which is going to focus on the specific types of content which you can and should be optimizing for search page optimization in mind.

Keywords – We’ll start off with the obvious one which everyone is familiar with, or at least which everyone THINKS that they’re familiar with, keywords. First, let’s not forget that it all STARTS with keyword research; before you can start dropping your keyword where it’s important, you need to know which keywords to target.

Once you’ve selected your keywords, it’s important that you use your keywords in a variety of different places. This includes your title, consequently in your URL, the body, H1/2/etc. tags, and other places such as internal link anchor text and images. Remember though that you don’t want your content to be overly optimized as you could risk an over optimization penalty so remember to vary up your main keyword with LSI keywords.

Images – I just alluded to this, but including an image or two in your post just for the sake of doing so is actually a good idea. Search engines love diverse content because they know that users love diverse content and will generally get more out of a page with multiple images related to their search than just a bunch of text.

Links – Google’s Penguin update involves over optimization and particularly in how it relates to link building. Remember that Penguin and consequently SEO in Google today at this moment is all about looking natural. If you don’t look natural, Google will assume something isn’t right and will punish you in favor of those who are doing it (or making it look) natural.

One of the major points to be taken from this is that anchor text pointing to your site should rarely if ever be your keyword phrase, particularly word for word. Instead, if you are building links to your site from another site, then you should use generic keyword anchor text which is reminiscent of something another webmaster would use when linking to your site.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that a webmaster granting you a natural link from their site won’t use your targeted keyword to link to you generally, so why would you do it when linking to your site. Google is smart enough to know what your site is about, if you get a high ranking link from an authoritative site, that will be enough to get them to look at your content and figure out what it’s about, so don’t waste your time sabotaging yourself to make it look unnatural if and when you’re building links to your own site.