Link Optimization

It is important to optimize your internal & external outbound links for search engines as well as to give your visitors a better navigation.

Important points to be kept in mind while link optimization:
• Try to use text links in your website so that the search engines can visit those pages.
• Try using good Anchor Text when you are linking to other people. Include the appropriate keyword in the anchor text which gives the outbound link a ‘proper meaning’ and value.
• A good & clean Internal Link Structure with proper use of anchor text will definitely help.

Keyword Optimization

The content of your website needs to be optimized in such a way that it can suit both search engines & your readers. Stuffing your site with too many keywords can make your site unreadable. So you will need to have some sort of balance between your keywords & your content.

Important points to be kept in mind while including keywords in your content:
• Research: Do a proper research before you decide on your keywords. There are plenty of free tools out there that can help you to do keyword research as mentioned earlier.

• Keyword Density: Try to have a moderate keyword density so that it can help the search engine to determine that your page is indeed related & relevant to the keyword that you are targeting.

• Synonyms & Related Keywords: Try to use synonyms instead of having a high keyword density. This helps to make my content sound natural but still helps in SEO.

• Long Tail Keywords: It’s often good to target some long tail keywords as they are comparatively easier to rank for. During your keyword research you should be able to gather some good long tail keywords that you can optimize your site for. But you can also come up with your own long tail keywords; for example try adding some common words like – ‘best’, ‘free’, ‘cheap’, ‘top’ etc. along with your actual keyword and you might eventually get some good long tail keywords.

Important HTML Tags

It is necessary for you to highlight certain parts of your website that you want your readers to look at. There are several tags in html which allows you to do so. For example – the headings [h1] [h2] [h3], Bold [strong], Italic [em] etc. The text inside your header tags (e.g. [h1]) is given very high importance by the search engine. Usually you can use them to define the page/post titles or the important sections of your website.

• Header Elements:
Header 1: Header 1 should be used to define the most important section of your page. Usually Header 1 is used for Site’s title or header text.

Header 2 & 3: Header 2 and 3 can be used for Page/Post titles or important sections of your pages. Separating your content with headers is a good practice as it makes your site more readable and easy to navigate.

• Text Styles:

Bold: You can bold (e.g. [strong]) certain words which are of high importance. Sometimes it’s good to bold your keywords where appropriate. However overdoing this may get you penalized.

Italic: You can use the [em] tag to emphasize certain words which will appear in italic.

Quote: This is very useful when you are quoting from someone.

Site Structure & Link Text

Introduction:
Developing the structure of your website is a very important step in its overall optimization. The site structure will dictate how the spiders read your site, what information they gather, what content holds the most weight, how much useless code they must weed through and more. You must structure your website to appeal to the visitor and the spiders.

There are four main points to be kept in mind while structuring a web site:

• Improving the user experience is your first goal, because this leads to higher conversion rates, happy customers, etc. If there is a comparison between creating a good user experience and an SEO objective, then site visitors will surely be of a great importance..

• Improving the “crawlability” of the site and channeling “link juice” (PageRank at Google, other search engines have their own formulas) into the most important pages – the ones that you’re trying to get ranked in search results. The method we use for this is called dynamic linking.

• Increasing the ranking of individual web pages within the site, and “broadening the profile” of our most important pages. By using the “anchor text” of our own internal links, and adding the right links in strategic places, we can boost our own search engine rankings.

• Getting more pages into the search engines’ index, also known as “index penetration.” Every additional page that gets indexed adds to our ability to improve our rankings, and in fact makes it easier to increase index penetration.

When developing your website you want to be sure not to create useless code that can confuse spiders and take away from the content of your site. When developing a site many people make the graphical layout with photoshop, create slices for the push-buttons and then they generate HTML. This is a mistake, you should maximize the use of HTML & minimize the use of above things and for that, Dreamweaver is a great option. The objective here is to keep the code as clean as possible! Remember the more code you have the more the spiders must weed through to get to your content, where you want them to be. A great way to cut down on extra code as well is to use style sheets. You can use style sheets in ways as simple as defining fonts or as advanced as creating tableless designs. There are many ways to use style sheets and the biggest perk to using them is to cut back on the code on any given individual page.

SEO - Some Important Points

Here are some important points to be kept in mind while including the keywords in the above parts of the website. Let’s see some important terms:

Keyword Frequency: It is how often a keyword appears on a page and in specific areas on a page.

Keyword Proximity: Describes how close keywords are to one another. This is one of many measurements search engines use to gauge a web site's relevance.

Keyword density: The number of times any keyword is repeated within a web page, expressed as a percentage of the total number of textual words on the page.

Keyword Stuffing: Keyword stuffing is the needless repetition of a keyword or keyword phrase in order to get higher ranking on search engines.

Looking on the above terms it would be clear that one should take a great care while using keywords in their website because search engines take into consideration all the above factors while deciding the relevance of your website. Don’t stuff keyword phrases together – spread them out throughout the text of your website. Bold or strong some keywords in the text as appropriate. Also put keywords into alt text and link text. Spiders prefer low keyword density, use keywords as they naturally make sense in text. The keyword density should be from 3% to 5%. If spiders feel that there is some keyword stuffing in the website then they may decrease your relevance your even penalize you.