Web Design & Marketing Blog

SEO Building Blocks: Going Higher & Higher

Category: Blog

Written by Estevan Montoya

Do you remember one of the greatest toys ever to be brought to children all across the world? What is it? LEGOS...And I loved them growing up. I remember getting them for Christmas and trying to build the set without using the instructions, and I normally failed, like most people. After I finally completed the set according to the instructions, I would let them sit for a while in perfect display, as if it came right off the cover of the box. Well, that got boring fast, so I would trash it, and make my own masterpiece as a 10 year old boy. I remember taking all my pieces and trying to build my own cites. One that never failed was the high my buildings became, the stronger my foundation had to be.

Looking back, as a kid, I didn't know building terms and things like foundation, but I was pretty quick to realize that every building would fall if the bottom block were not in proper place. The foundation of anything will determine how high it can go or how long something will last. The same is true for websites. If you want your page to go higher in the search engines, then you need to lay the proper foundation. There are many new trends and buzzwords in the web world. They are all great, and should be taken advantage of, but there are some fundamental aspects that we need to heed to in our SEO efforts.

What Are The Building Blocks To Successful SEO? 

In the SEO world, there are now three elements to SEO:

On Site SEO

This is there you optimize your website to be properly crawled by search engines. There is a wide variety of items to consider in on site SEO. When optimizing your website, you should consider the following:

• Page Title
  You home page title should include a keyword or keyphrase that you are promoting with you actual website title. I know it maybe be long, but this is the first thing that appears in the search engines, therefore, you should have that keyword in the title. The same is true for blog posts. The Title of the blog should be in the page title with your website name as well. 
• Meta Description
  In you actual page files or in your CMS back end, you should be able to set a description of each page. Each page should have it's own unique description with an entire keyphase that relates to the page itself, while being in the context of your website. For instance, in your contact page (which is pretty boring in most cases), you description could be:
  
  "Contact VivaNet2.0 you place to find affordable websites. Learn more about our great website design services"
  
   Notice that I used two keyphrases: affordable websites and website design services
• Meta Keywords
  This is the simple place where you actually put keywords that relate to both the website and the individual page. You can have as many as you like, but each search engine only picks up about the first 15 keywords/keyphrases, so make sure the most important ones are listed first. Also, in many CMS's, you can insert keywords into individual pages without having to get into any code. 
• Keywords/Keyphrases
  We have been talking about these in this entire section, so let me explain what they are. Basically, a keyword is a specific word that is used by people when they look for websites in search engines. It's the word they type in the search box. If you have a specific website that is targeted to a particular audience, then you need to find out what they are searching for in search engines, and optimize your website so they can find it when they search. Now in days, people are searching for more than just on keyword, hence, keyphrases, which are entire phrases people type in search engines. When considering these "keys", make sure that you are looking at them in the eyes of the person searching, and not in the eyes of what makes sense to you. When you have your list of "keys", then implement them into you website as found in the previous points, and to following points as well.
• H1 Tags
  After search engines have scanned your site based on title, description, and keywords, they look to see if you site have <h1> tags, which are the headings in your site that are the largest. They not only get attention, but they are a good place to insert you keywords or keyphrases. Search engines love this, because to them, the <h1> has a lot of weight, therefore, your important words need to be there.
• Intro Paragraph
  After you heading, you need an intro paragraph. This normally applies to blogs, since they have new content more frequently, but a simple page needs to pay attention to this as well. Your intro paragraph needs to have a well written statement about the post with your target keyword or keyphrase in it. While doing this, you need to be careful as to amount of times you use the keyword. If it's there too many times, search engines will penalize you page because of "keyword stuffing". Also, it becomes obvious to the reader that you are trying to place the keyword in too many times. Your reader don't want keywords, they want content. So please be careful with the crucial area of your website. 
• Interlinking
  As mentioned in our article are how we made it to first page of Google, we believe that part of that is attributed to using our blog to link back to previous blog posts, keeping them alive and allowing viewers to stay on our site a little longer. When you interlink, don't use "click here" as the link. Rather, in your text, if there is a phrase that matches a previous article of page, then use that text as the link. It is a keyphrase with a link (also known as an "a href"), and search engines crawl that, helping boost SEO for older posts and pages. You want to keep these pages alive, so use interlinking to do so. 
• Sitemaps
  As site contains all the pages and posts on your website. It is a basic listing of everything on your website. Normally, these are saved as XML files, which make it easier for search engines to crawl. In most CMS's, everything you add content, your site map should be updated. There are plugins that make it automated. Also, after a site map is updated, it should be submitted to search engines and website directories. Having a plugin do this makes it easy to help your SEO.

This is enough to make you examine your site to see if you are following the rules of search engines in your own website. We will have two more articles. Come back to learn more about Off Site SEO, and Social Media Optimization.

Also, if all this is too hard to understand, since you may not know how to do this in html, then we recommend LEXY Sites, our affordable website solution. It has a back end system that allows one to do exactly what was taught in this post about on site SEO.