What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) occupies a lot of webmasters a lot of the time. It is roughly described as the steps needed to ensure that a website appears in a high position in the search engine results for its chosen keywords.

SEO falls into two parts: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. The offpage SEO (possibly the more important of the two) will include links to your site, for example. On-page optimisation refers to the things you can do on the site itself.

As I have said before, it is important to know your ‘keywords’ for a site or page, because you want links to your site to include this phrase, or variants on it, as often as possible. The text that someone clicks on to reach your site should say ‘free wordpress templates’ rather than, for example, www.freetemplatesand stuffhere.com or whatever your site is actually called.

With this in mind, you want the search engines to know what your page is about - your keywords.

A typical website page includes metatags - title and description - and then a body filled with text, both headers and normal text, and images.

As a quick guide you should ensure that your keyword/keyphrase is included in the title, as part of the description, one of the headers and occasionally in the text. Which it will be anyway, if your page really is about that subject, but you need to check that the title and description are relevant, and not just system default settings.

A few years ago, if I had a site about, say, red spanners, I could include the phrase ‘red spanners’ several time in the title, description, and keywords field and then plaster the page with the expression, and it would do well in the search engines when someone searched for ‘red spanners’. No more.

If google etc think you are cheating in this way they will banish your site to a page in the search results where no one ever goes…they are becoming increasingly sophisticated at measuring both ‘keyword density’ (how many times your keyword occurs) and at reading the surrounding text to see if it is also relevant and appropriate.

So more and more, on page optimisation should be made redundant. Already there are suggestions that the ‘description’ is becoming less important (as keywords did a few years ago). However it is still recommended that you check the phrase is on the page a few times, in context and with variants rather than always the exact same phrase, just to help them along a bit.

One other aspect is images. Again losing importance as search engines become more sophisticated, but if you do have a picture of ‘red spanners’ call the file ‘redspanners.jpg’ and enter alternative text of ‘red spanners’ or a short phrase like ‘picture of red spanners’ (the alt text is to help people who are looking at your site on a device that can’t display pictures, and who see the alt text instead).

With all these aspects of on-page SEO the most important thing is now not to overdo it.

Note that the recent trend in on page optimisation is called LSI, which is for another day. But the general idea is, as mentioned above, that the text around the keywords is becoming more important, and the whole page being checked to see if it is actually about what your keywords are claiming.

One side effect of this is that if you have links to (or from) completely unrelated sites, they will be seen as being out of context and devalued - hence they are of less use to you. So having links on your page to gambling and pharmacy sites, when your site is about red spanners, will be of little help to anyone.