As promised, here is the lesson on onsite search engine optimization. This is a really broad topic, so this isn’t going to be a comprehensive lesson on the subject. Instead, we will cover the most important aspects.

For this lesson, we are going to focus on your homepage. Your homepage is your most important page!

Purpose

The purpose of onsite search engine optimization is to show up in search engines when people search for keywords. We all want to be #1! For this lesson, let’s say that we want our site to come up #1 for the search term ‘cell phones’.

Must Haves

HTML Title Tag - You really need to have your keyword in your title tag. If at all possible, you want your title to say only ‘cell phones’, again assuming that ‘cell phones’ is the keyword phrase your trying to optimize for.

Heading 1

It is really important to have your keyword in there! The heading 1 of each page identifies what the page is about to the reader. The search engines know this and want to see the keyword there.

Keyword throughout the text. This can be overdone! You want the keyword to appear througout the text about 3 times and you want it to appear near the top of the page. Some of you will be stubborn, adding the keyword 6 or 7 times. This won’t work and will probably make it so you don’t get ranked at all!

Believe it or not, those are the only places that you must have your keyword.

Places To Put Your Keyword If It’s Possible

Domain Name

I would highly recommend using your keyword in your domain name. My cell phones blog is called cellphonesglobal.com. I rank alot higher with that site from having cell phones in the domain name. For some this won’t be possible. The domain for this site doesn’t have a keyword in it!
Meta Keywords

It is good to put your keyword in the meta keywords, but I have found that you can still get ranked well without doing this.

Meta Description

Having your keyword near the beginning of your meta description will definitely help! If your type of site or blog will allow this I would highly recommend it.

Alt Tag

Use you keyword in 1 alt tag on the page. In other words, I would put a picture of some cell phones, using cell phones as the alt tag for the picture.

Links

You really need to do this one! There are two ways that you should do this.

First, you should use cell phones as the anchor text at least once. For example, you should make a link that looks like this, cell phones.

Second, you should like to a page that has your keyword in it’s URL. The above example does this, as it links to http://www.cellphonesglobal.com/.

In order to make this work, you should do both!

Other Things You Should Really Do

You should make sure that your homepage has at least 500 words of text on it. If it doesn’t, it probably won’t look like a very important page to a search engine!

You should also link to plenty of pages that talk about similar topics. These pages can be pages of your site, or pages from other sites.

Conclusion

The most important aspect of onsite search engine optimization is making sure that you don’t overdo it. If you repeat your keyword too many times, you’re dead in the water.