SEO Optimized Page Components

There are many elements that has to be optimized to achieve the best ranking. For example having only optimized meta tags without the proper content and links will not be good.

Optimizing your pages for the right keywords in meta tags will not be sufficient without having content or if the content is not readable by search engines.

Entry and exit pages are the first and last pages that a visitor sees when he visits your site. Entry page isn’t necessarily always the home page of your website. It can be any page on your site that he lands on from search engines, incoming links, bookmarks etc.

Usually most of the websites are actually several small connected sites. Your web site might have sections for several different topics. If you sell houses you will have several hubs for luxury houses, low cost house, and averagely priced houses for example.

Each hub will have a main page — that will represent an entry page for that section — and several additional pages leading from that central page to other pages containing relevant content, info on houses and other information about specific topics.

Deciding which pages might be entry pages helps you to optimize those pages for search engine crawlers. For example if you have an alternative medicine website you will divide your site into several sections like yoga, meditation, reiki etc. If those entry pages are SEO optimized for the proper keywords each of those pages will bring you traffic for different keywords. So the homepage will not be the only page that will be found in SERPS.

Because entry pages are so important you should monitor them with appropriate web site analytics program to make sure they are working in proper way as you want them to work. For analytics program you can choose from many programs like Google Analytics (that is very popular), statcounter, aweber … It will show you your top entry and exit pages.

Exit pages are different from the entry pages. And users leave your site from them. Why are exit pages also important? They drive users from entry page to a desired exit page that might be a checkout, receipt page where you close a sale. There is so called userpath that users travel through your site. A sample path might look like this:

SERP > ➪Home Page > ➪Yoga > YogaProduct Pages > ➪ Yoga Shopping Cart > Checkout >➪Receipt

For this example, Home is the entry page and Receipt is the exit page. You can always check this navigational

path, and you can discover how users travel through your site and where they leave your site. You can use so called bread-crumb trail for users so they can always see where they are on your site.

The bread-crumb trail will help them to easily return to a previous page in the navigational path; bread crump path is also beneficial for search engine bots, they will easily discover and crawl your site.

Page titles are one of the most important elements of SEO. When a crawler checks your page, the first thing he sees are the page titles. Optimizing your page titles is vital process. When you create your web site, you need to have great page titles.

Unless you’re a major company don’t put your company name in the page title. Better use a descriptive keyword or phrase that tells users exactly what is on that page. This is vital for proper rankings in SERPS.

Page titles should be less than 50 characters long, including spaces. Usually most of the search engines will index only up to 50 characters; others might index as many as 150. Using shorter titles forces you to be more precise in the titles that you choose and ensures that your page title will never be cut off in the search results.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has determined that the overall length of a

page title shouldn’t be longer than 64 characters. Search engines are different on how long title they index. Using 64 characters or less is a normal practice, however, that still leaves your

page titles cut off in search engines that only index up to 40 or 50 characters. So the best way is to use 40 or less characters in the page title.

Don’t repeat keywords in your title tags. Search engines might think you are spamming them with keyword repetition. Avoid repeating them if possible and never stuff the same keywords with intention to spam. It could get your site banned or delisted from SERPS and index.

You can add special characters at the beginning and end of your title to improve noticeability. Parentheses (()), arrows (<<>>), asterisks (****), can help draw a user’s attention to your page title. These special characters usually don’t have any effect on SEO optimization. They only increase the attention to your site title.

Include a call to action in your title. There is a rule floating around and says, “You’ll never sell a thing if you don’t ask for the sale.” If you want your users to do something you have to ask them to.

Make sure your page titles are short, descriptive, and tagged into your web-site code. By using title tags, you’re increasing the possibility that your web site will be ranked high within search engine results.

Great content uses the right keywords and phrases. You should use maximum three keywords or phrases to include in the content on any one of your web pages. If you use too many keywords the keywords are less effective. Another problem is using more than 3 keywords or phrases per page is that search engines might think you are spamming your content and that might get your site removed from index.

Choose two or three for each page of your site and stick with those.

Once you selected two or three keywords or phrases you need to use them in the content of your page. Many people think the more frequently you use the keywords the better position in SERPS you will achieve. That is not true. Overusing the same word will also cause crawlers to consider your attempts as keyword stuffing. Your site might get excluded from search indexes.

There is a special phrase used to describe how many times a keyword is used on a page and is called keyword density. For most search engines, the keyword density is relatively low. Google is especially cautious about ranking sites that have a keyword density between 5 to 7 percent; much lower or much higher and your ranking is seriously affected or completely lost.

Yahoo!, MSN, and other search engines allow keyword densities to reach 5 percent. Exceeding that number might get your website excluded from search results.

Another rule about content is to keep it fresh and updated. That is the reason many companies are using blogs on their web sites because blogs are updated frequently and they’re highly focused on a specific topic.

That way search engines get a new fresh content that is relevant and search engines like that.

Your strategy should be adding fresh content frequently to your website. It does not have to be necessary a blog, you could have a news content, new articles that will alert search engines and will make them crawl your site more often.

You should also regularly update your content and check for broken links in your content. Many times website goes offline and if you link to them your link will become broken links. That is bad for rankings in SERPS, so make sure you check your broken links frequently.

There is a special program that is checking your site for broken links cal Xenu. Check it out.

Images on your website are also an essential part. They are usually ignored by search engines, so what is the point having them ?

If you are not using pictures, your site is just a boring pile of text. Users want to see pictures. Images tags are also beneficial for SEO. You can use alt tags for improving your SEO.

Alt tags are the HTML tags that are used to display alternative text when there is a graphic present. Alt tags should be short and should have your keywords if possible.

The alternative text tag is where your keywords should be included if at all possible. But don’t overuse your keywords.

Alt tags are read by crawlers, and that is why you should include your keywords in alt tags.

Another reason to use alt tags is to take advantage of image search engines like Google or Yahoo Images. You can use images with your keyword and if the keywords in alt tags match to the searche keywords users might click on your picture and come to your site.

So many users are visiting your site because of the images they find. But don’t overuse your images.