How To Optimizing Site Content

Writing Better Anchor Text

Anchor text usually gives the user relevant descriptive or contextual information about the content of the link’s destination. Writing anchor text with targeted keywords and phrases improve your search engine ranking and generate more web traffic. Linking information on one page of your website, to related information found on a different page of your website, helps search engine algorithms determine what the content of the destination page is all about.

Following a few simple guidelines, you can use well-written links, with keyword anchor text, to give the search engine spiders better information about the contents of your site’s pages. Developing good anchor text is easier if you took the time to build a list of targeted keywords. If you have more than one contributor to the site make sure they all have a list of your keywords.

Rule One:

Don’t anchor text with “Read more…” or “Click Here”

Instead, write:

Find out more about our dog training services

Or Better Yet:

Learn how to house train your new puppy

Anchor text usually gives the user relevant descriptive or contextual information about the content of the link’s destination. Writing anchor text with targeted keywords and phrases improve your search engine ranking and generate more web traffic.

Optimize your images for SEO and Accessibility

An important, and largely overlooked, an aspect of SEO is imaged ALT attributes. A visually interesting website, one that will attract, and hold, a visitor’s attention, will have images and pictures that quickly convey the topic and tone of the site. These images are also an underutilized opportunity to improve the overall SEO of your website.

Alt attributes are the text that describes the image. Alt attributes are displayed on the site while the images are loading, or when you hover over the image with your mouse. Additionally, well-crafted Alt attributes help visually impaired people who are using text readers to read your web pages.

Alt attributes offer another opportunity to insert your keywords to improve your site’s organic rankings in the search engines. Even if your text content already contains keywords, you can still improve and reinforce your most important keywords using this method — just don’t overdo it.

Having alt attributes along with the descriptive naming of your images will help drive traffic to your site from Google Images.

Some Addition Notes About Images

•  Make sure all images have keyword-rich, readable file names that actually describe the image. That will help you in image search results.
• Make sure images have sensible, relevant text around them. Captions always help.
• If you are using videos from YouTube — make sure the video title and description contain relevant keywords.

Site Images should have a sitemap too

With image search, just as with web search, Google’s goal is to provide the best and most relevant search results to our users. Following Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and best practices for publishing images can increase the likelihood that

your images will be returned in those search results. In addition, you can also use Google’s image extensions for Sitemaps to give Google additional information about the images on your site’s URLs. Doing this can help Google discover images we might not otherwise find (such as images that are reached via JavaScript forms), and also enables you to identify the most important images on a page. For example, if your site uses templates, every page might feature a boilerplate image. By not listing this image in your Sitemap, you’re telling Google that it’s less important than the images you have included. However, Google doesn’t guarantee that we’ll index all of your images or use all of the information in your Sitemap.

To give Google information about images on your site, you’ll need to begin by creating a standard web Sitemap. See sample and instructions at Google Webmaster Tools. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=178636

 Make use of the “description” meta tag

Meta tags are HTML codes that are inserted into the header on a web page, after the title tag. In the context of search engine optimization, when people refer to meta tags, they are usually referring to the meta description tag and the meta keywords tag. The main purpose of these tags is providing meta document data for searching engines. And are not seen by users.

Meta tags are no longer a primary SEO tool. If you view the source code of some web pages you can find lists of superfluous meta tags. There are only three meta tags we’ll concern ourselves with here; the meta keywords, meta description, and meta robots tags.

• Meta Keyword – The meta keywords tag is mostly useless. Danny Sullivan wrote a great post on the meta keywords tag and I’ll refer you to it for more detail. The gist about this tag is that it’s simply too easy to spam for it to serve any use. Some search engines completely ignore the tag and those that still read it, don’t place much emphasis on it. One possible negative effect of including meta keywords is they give your competitors an easy way to determine what you want a page to rank for and what might be a good money making phrase
• Meta Description – On the other hand you should spend time writing a good meta description tag. Their impact on ranking is probably minimal, but they possibly have some influence on search results. Ranking or not they stand a fair chance of being used as the snippet below your link in search results and do help convince people to click on your link. It’s a good idea to write a unique meta description for every page on your site.
• Meta Robots – Most of the time you won’t need to add a meta robots tag to your pages since you want the default values. You can assign values of index, follow, noindex, and nofollow to your meta robots tag. The default is index, follow and since this is what you usually want you don’t need to include the tag. The main use of this tag is to tell search engines not to index a page or not to follow the links on the page.

Using Heading Tags Correctly

Page Headings are the “H1, H2, H3, etc.” html tags found in your WordPress drop-down menu.

Search engines place a little more emphasis on what’s in your page headings than they do in your page copy. It is a good practice to use a primary phrase in your H1 tag and then variations of the phrase or secondary phrases in other page headings.

Headings are a way to structure your site’s content. You should use only one H1 heading on a page and structure the other headings as necessary. Don’t sacrifice readability to “stuff” keywords into headings.