In a previous article, More Website Visitors thru Inbound Links, I outlined a number of relatively easy ways to establish inbound links to your website and thus aid in improving its search engine ranking.

In this article, I’ll walk you through the basics of search engine optimizing each page within your website. While you may neither have the time nor inclination to optimize your site pages yourself, this will provide you with a firm basis with which to check that your site designer keeps search engines in mind when writing page content.

Develop Your Key Phrases
Step one of the page optimization process is to develop your key phrases. These will form the basis for not only your page content – what your readers see – but other hidden page elements as well. It all starts here.

I say ‘key phrases’ vice ‘key words’ as the majority of searches are done by phrase and not by single words. For example, a potential Alaskan visitor would search for the phrase ‘Alaska Hotel’ rather than ‘Alaska’ or ‘Hotel’. As phrases are what searchers use, we’ll do the same.

Begin by brainstorming your key phrases. What goods or services do you provide? Where are you located? What's your proximity to other draws? Perhaps most importantly; what would you, family members, or your friends search for? Try to put yourself in the mind of a potential customer.

Limit your key phrases to no more than three (less is even better) per page. Besides being extremely difficult to write meaningful page content, more than three makes each phrase less valuable from a key phrase density perspective. I’ll explain more on key phrase density a little later. Just trust me for now, less is better.

Now that you have your list of no more than three key phrases per page, it’s time to see which will actually make the final list and which can be scratched. Do this by using a nifty online tool called the Overture Keyword Selector. Overture is actually a part of Yahoo and the Keyword Selector shows the number of times a particular word or phrase (remember, think phrase) was searched on Yahoo during previous month. This very useful tool is at: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/.

Use the tool, modify or whittle down your list of key phrases, and get ready to start creating your page.

Write Your Page Title
With your key phrases in hand, construct your page title. The page title is arguably the single most important element on your page as it’s the first thing read by all major search engines. It’s also the first text displayed in search results and because of this, it should be written for the reader. Think of it as your first sales pitch.

A limiting factor to the length of the page title is that Google will only display the first 67 characters. With Google being the 800 pound gorilla of search engines, 67 characters should be the maximum length of your page title as well. This said; do include your single most important key phrase in the page title. Remember, you’re writing the page title for both search engines and human eyes.

Write Your Meta Tags
Despite the widely held belief that Meta tags (Description and Keywords) matter, for the most part they don’t. Just as the page title is perhaps the most important page optimization element, Meta tags are the least important. Simply put, Google and Yahoo largely ignore them, while only some lesser search engines lend them any credence. This doesn’t mean you should completely ignore them, but given their relative unimportance, keep their construction simple.

Description Meta: Write a maximum 150 character description employing all your key phrases once. Do write the description as another sales pitch as this is often appended to the page title in search results.

Keyword Meta: Limit your Keyword Meta to only your key phrases separated by commas. If the page in question uses the key phrases Alaska Hotel, Alaska Lodging, Alaska Accommodations, your Keyword Meta would be written exactly the same way.

Write Your Page Content
Now that you’ve written your page title and added your description and keyword Metas, it’s time to start the most involved process of all - writing your page content.

Quality page content is really a balance between grammatical license and readability – incorporating your target key phrases for use by search engines while still putting across a coherent message to your human audience. For example, if one of your key phrases is ‘Alaska Hotel’ but proper grammar calls for using ‘Alaskan Hotel’ in a sentence, take the minor grammatical hit and stick with your key phrase, ‘Alaska Hotel’. The sentence still reads just fine to your human visitors while sticking to your optimization objective. English majors feel free to throw stones.

Use the following four step approach to writing your content:

1. Write the page text with no concern for your key phrases.
2. Integrate your key phrases into what you wrote in step one.
3. Take a walk in the woods or go shopping. Walk away from your work for awhile.
4. Re-read and re-edit where necessary.

When writing page content, think hierarchical if possible. This isn’t always easy to accomplish given different products, site purposes, and general aesthetic considerations, but hierarchy can make a difference in search rankings. Page content hierarchy is best illustrated as such:

Heading
   Sub Heading
      Text
   Sub Heading
      Text

Include your single most important key phrase (the same one used in your page title) as the heading.

A Few Words on Formatting and Key Phrase Density
First let me explain what I mean by format and density. In this context, format means bolding and italicizing. Density means the number of times a key phrase is used in relation to all words or phrases on the page. For example, a key phrase used seven times on a page consisting of 100 words of text will have a density of 7%.

Format and Density are especially important to our 800 pound gorilla, Google, and should be important to you as well.

In addition to including your key phrases in your page content as normal text, consider adding them once as bold and once as italicized text. Also try to work in at least one outbound link to either a related internal page or external site using all or part of a key phrase.

Key phrase density should be limited to no more than 15% per page. This said; DO NOT consider 15% a target to shoot for but rather anything more than 15% as something to avoid. More than 15% could be considered search engine spam and work against you. In many cases, a page with a key phrase density of 7% that uses a well written title, proper hierarchy, and a smattering of different formatting, will perform better than a lower quality page containing a higher key phrase density. Quality over quantity wins every time.

To determine a page’s key phrase density, use one of the following two density analyzers:
http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html
http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/kwda.cgi

One tip on each of these tools; don’t include your Description Meta, Keyword Meta, or Alt or Title tags (defined below) in your calculations. Check or uncheck their boxes as appropriate.

Adding Alt and Title Tags
While Alt and Title tags are of relatively minor from a search engine optimization standpoint, don’t ignore them completely as every minor bit counts.

The Alt tag is the text you see when you move your mouse over a picture or graphic. For example, move your mouse over this graphic:

While of little importance to search engines, it’s very useful to screen reading software used by the visually impaired.

The Title tag is the text that appears when the mouse is moved over a text link such as this link here. Again, it’s of relatively minor importance to search engines but a nice touch nevertheless.

Don’t let optimizing your site pages intimidate you. While requiring a bit of planning, research, and creative writing, search engine optimizing your website isn’t necessarily the exclusive domain of the pros. You know your business, your potential customers, and undoubtedly what they’re apt to search for better than anyone else. If you do decide to go with a pro, you’ll now be better prepared to work with them.

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