“Welcome” is Not a Useful Keyword – 10 On Page SEO Tips

It’s nice to be friendly and welcome your visitors to your website, but unless you are in the hospitality business, using Welcome! as your home page header and title is wasting valuable real estate when it comes to SEO (search engine optimization). You can have welcoming content for your visitors without sacrificing the best practices of SEO. Remember that a website is your primary tool for marketing your business online and you need to do what it takes to ensure your website is found.

For those business owners that are writing the content for their website, keep these following on page SEO tips handy. Rather than provide the list in order of priority from an SEO perspective, I will present them in the order the human needs to address them.

10 On Page SEO Tips

1. Write quality body copy using variations on your main keyword phrase. Each page of your website should talk about a specific topic, which naturally optimizes the page. Use the most important keywords pertaining to that page early (within the first 50 – 100 words). Emphasizing phrases of your copy using italics or bold to make it stand out for the reader can have an additional benefit if the emphasis is on a phrase that contains your keywords.
2. Use heading tags (H1 through H6) strategically on your page. Search engines give headings more weight than regular body copy, therefore you should spend time writing great headings with appropriate keywords. A good example is the heading above “10 On Page SEO Tips” that uses a H2 (heading 2) tag. Although studies have shown that the heading tags have no SEO value, have your Web developer style these tags for your site and use them instead of trying to style the fonts manually. This will make your copy more interesting to your readers, even if the heading tags have little SEO value.
3. Use keywords as anchor text when linking internally. If you are offering a great ebook on the “Exercises that Can Cause Back Injuries”, use keywords in the text that links to the document rather than generic words such as “click here”. For example, use: Download your copy of “Exercises that Can Cause Back Injuries“, with the title linked to the actual file.
4. Write a descriptive alt attribute on the image tag for all images using the top keyword phrase for that page. Keyword rich Alt tags help your page get better rankings. Using the keyword phrase as the file name of the image also helps with traffic to your website.
5. Create unique page titles using relevant keywords. The page title is the most important on-page SEO element. Unlike humans that think of your Website as one entity, search engines ranks each page independently. If you are using the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress, create different page titles for each page of your site using one or two keyword phrases that describe the content that not only is interesting to the human visitor but tells the search engine robots what the page is all about for proper indexing. Preferably, put the most relevant keyword first in the title. Don’t leave the page title with the default “Page Name | Blog Title”.
6. Get a domain name that contains your main keyword. If you already have a domain name for your business, this may be more difficult but if you are starting fresh, spend some time trying out different domains to get one that helps your ranking. A useful website for researching domain names is Domainsbot. Type in words and it spins out potential domain names.
7. Use “pretty permalinks”. WordPress handles the page and post naming based on the title you give it so think about what you want to call the page that gets you the most benefits. Having a Services page is nice, but having a Services page that is displayed in the navigation as “Personal Training Services” is better.
8. Control the content that shows up in the search engine results. Writing quality descriptions for each page increases click-through rates from the search engine results pages to your website. So although search engines don’t use the meta description tag directly, when your site does appear in the results, give the reader a reason to visit your site.
9. Create an XML Sitemap and upload it to the search engines. An XML Sitemap tells the search engines where to look for all of your content and ensure that pages on the site get indexed in the search engine’s directory. This is especially important on websites where content changes frequently (i.e. your Blog) or have a large number of pages. To easily create one on your WordPress website, use the Google Sitemap Generator plugin that does all the work for you including notifying the search engines that there is new content.
10. Keep your site structure simple. I usually recommend that your website go no deeper than 3 levels away from the home page in the site navigation. If humans can’t find your content, neither will the search engine robots. Important content should be close to the home page for not only the search engines but also to make it easy for people you are trying to create a relationship with to find.

For those of you who want more education on how to  build the perfectly optimized page, read the post on SEOmoz titled Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization.

Search engine marketing starts with a website that has implemented the basics of search engine optimization. Nothing feels better than having your phone ring and a prospect is calling you because they found you on the Internet. It’s even nicer when they found you in the organic search engine results, regardless of which search engine they use. Strive to do the basics.

Have you implemented basic SEO on your Web site?