The Basics Of On Page SEO – Part Two is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

Make your site visitors feel at home.

In part one of this post we looked at the concept of on page SEO: what it is, how it differs from off page SEO and three of the first things you can be focusing on to get your website in good SEO shape.

In the first part we focused on “back end” optimization techniques; here we will focus more on what visitors and search engines “see” when they land on your website and how to go about optimising these pages with further techniques.

1. Your Web Page Copy – Keyword Focus

What you actually do with your keywords in the web copy of the relevant pages of your website is equally as important as your page titles and descriptions.

Each page should be focused on 1 or 2 keywords, no more. For instance you can have a main keyword phrase like “Melbourne SEO Services” and then a variation or two such as “SEO services” and “search engine optimisation services” which you can also include in your copy.

2. Keyword Frequency/Density/ Placement

Use the same keyword phrase at least 2 or 3 times on the page. Your web texts should be at least 300 words long and you might want to include your keyword phrase around 3 times in every 500 words – once in the first paragraph, once in the last paragraph and perhaps once in the middle section.

3. Added Extras

A few other places to focus on web page optimization are the H1 tags (headings) on your website, plus using bolded text, italics and also making sure your image tags include keywords. It’s even better if you get your keywords into the URLs of your pages ( eg. www.yourdomain/keyword.html)

4. Keep It Natural And Readable

What many website owners get wrong is focusing too much on pleasing the “bots” and not enough on pleasing their visitors. It’s humans who open their wallets and buy goods and services from you, so you need to keep all of your content interesting, informative and relevant; weave in your keywords, but keep it readable. The search engine rankings will follow if you are providing relevant and interesting content for your customers as you will normally be well rewarded for natural SEO.

5. Do All This Even If You Have Video

With the huge popularity of online video these days, it’s tempting to cut a few corners; please note that you should still create texts with your keywords, even if you have video as your main focal point. Search engine robots cannot read video, so always add a short text summary of what’s in your video on the page.

Most of the above on page SEO methods are not too time consuming; some may take a little practice to get right but, for a small investment of time, the benefits can be great: most small businesses don’t need to use 100% of the SEO techniques to get to Number 1 on Google because it’s not that competitive – completing 80% will get most businesses there and that’s why we’ve given you some of the main approaches in these two articles.

For further excellent tips and advice for your new online business, head on over for a free viewing of the Competition Crusher workshop here: www.crusherworkshop.com.

Will Your Flash Websites Fail To Rank? is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

Will Flash bring you down?

I’ve been asked this question numerous times and it may have been because people have misinterpreted something I’ve said in the past – “Flash based websites are a bad idea.” What I was getting at here was, having “exclusive” Flash websites is not a great idea – and here’s why…

When the Google spider is crawling around the web, you want to make it as easy as possible for it to navigate your website. This is done through your linking structure and/or your nav bar. Google needs to be able to follow your links to find your pages, so it can index them.

If you’re using exclusively Flash based menus and your website is Flash heavy, Google can’t read this. There’s nothing for it to grab hold of. You need content on your page. Don’t get me wrong, you don’t have to discard Flash completely.

Flash can help engage users and when used well it can look great. That is equally important because it can make your website more sticky (help retain visitors longer) and hopefully convert visitors to buyers. So Flash isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

It’s important to follow the standard rules of thumb for on page optimization: make sure you choose the appropriate keyword, put it in the title tag, and meta description. Put some content on the page and the text in it; you also want to have crawlable links so the spiders can follow them around.

With all that that said and done, like all things SEO, you can still rank pure Flash websites simply by using enough back links. The fact is, if you’ve got enough back links, you can rank just about anything!

A good rule of thumb though, is to make sure you have that good on page optimization, have the crawlable links and some content on your site.

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On Page SEO & Using The H1 Tag is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

Don't kill yourself over adding tags.

First, do you know what an H1 tag is? In short, H1 tags are simply html code that call out and format certain text as a heading. Many SEOers say that it’s important, for good SEO, to have an H1 tag set on every page with the primary keyword phrase within the tag. Is that true?

As a standard rule of thumb, for good on page SEO, you need to pick out what your primary keyword phrases you’re targeting are going to be. Next you need to make sure it’s in your title tag and in your meta description. You can put your primary keyword in your meta keywords, but it really isn’t important anymore. We just do it because it makes us feel better . Then, make sure the keyword is mentioned throughout the page. Include it in an H1 tag and then mention it a couple of times on that page. You might even put it in bold, italics and/or make it a link.

All that’s just standard practice for on page SEO but it’s not crucial! Any SEOer worth his salt knows the most important factor in SEO is linking. The fact is, you can have a page ranked #1 without the keyword even being on the page, as long as you have enough good quality inbound links.

So, where do H1 tags fall in the hierarchy of things which have an influence over your rankings then? SEOmoz.com has done some research and found that there’s little correlation between changing your H1 tags and an increase in rankings. Hmmm, isn’t that interesting?

So, when doing on page optimization, in order of priority, having the keyword in the title is the most important thing. Then you want to have the keyword in the meta description and then in the H1 tag. Below this is having that keyword on the page in the content, where it can be bolded or italicized. So, as you can see, it’s really not “that important” especially when you consider on page optimization makes up only 20% of the whole SEO equation.

Want to find out what the other 80% of SEO is? Be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed and download our free SEO report.

Stage 2: Website Optimisation is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

Website Optimisation

Having identified the keywords you’re going to target, you now need to ensure Google sees your website as a good match for those keywords when people are searching them. To do this you need to put your keywords in the right places on your website – this is know as on page optimization.

We recommend each page of your website should only be optimised for a maximum of 1-2 keywords. And for each page, include your keyword in the following places:

- The title tag

- The meta description

- The meta keywords

- Within an <H1> tag

- Early and often in the text on your webpage

- Within an internal link

*Please note: If you don’t know html, you may not be familiar with these terms, but that’s OK. Just pass this information onto your web designer or SEO company.

If you’d like to find out more about website optimisation, watch the video below: