Ten Things You Should Do To Make Your Website Optimized For Humans and Search Engine Spiders!

Completed Your Keyword Research?

Here are ten things you should do to optimize your web pages. These are ranked in increasing order of difficulty. The easy ones are first.

Improve Web Page Titles and Remove Duplicates

Look through your web pages. How many of them have no titles or titles that are too generic / duplicates?

Modify your titles to include important keyword phrases and get rid of duplicate titles. At the same time, don't make your title appear spammy by stuffing random keywords.

Structure your web pages properly and improve web page headings

Do the same with your web page headings. Use a good page structure that includes <h1>, <h2>, <h3> tags. Don't over use the h1 tag.

Make sure that the headings are natural and contain the important and relevant keywords. Simply don't stuff keywords into headings.

See how to create good headlines for more ideas.

Check, Improve and Optimize Web Page Copy

Use keyword phrases in your web page content. Keywords when used properly as part of web page text can really increase your traffic from long-tail keyword searches. However, as mentioned multiple times above, don't over-stuff keywords and make your web pages spammy.

Make Good Use of Anchor Texts

Use keywords in link texts (anchor text). Replace the links that say click here to more relevant ones that have the keyword in it, if possible. Use good anchor texts even if you are linking to pages on your own sites (internal links)

URL Explorer is very handy for checking anchor texts. You can quickly get a list of all anchor texts used in any web page with a single click after entering the URL!

Create relevant "Alt" Tags for all Images

Use relevant image tags (img alt tags). Many images may not even have an alt text. Look through your web pages and add them wherever possible.

Alt tags are used for images so that people with visual disabilities can understand what the image is about (for example, a text reader can read out the alternate text).

Don't stuff keywords into the alt tag. Just describe what the image is about. Some people do suggest optimizing the alt tag because it is used by Google image search.

Learn From Your Log Files

Study your log files and pick all the long-tail keyword phrases used by your visitors. The advantage of studying long-tail keywords is that the intention behind the search is more easy to understand. Do you think your product or service can help such visitors?  Optimize your web pages so that you offer what they are looking for.

Check your visitor entry pages and exit pages and look for patterns. Optimize your web page content based on what you learn.

Analyze and Study Your Competition

Do a Google / Yahoo / Live (Bing) search for the keywords and then study the top competitors. Improve your products, services and web pages based on your research. Please see "why study your competition" for some tips.

Write Articles or Blog

Write articles that describe your products / services and post it to your blog. Look for news and events that may interest your audience and let them know about it through your blog posts. Use relevant headlines and sub-headings that also include important keywords.

Don't have a blog? Start one. It is very easy to setup Wordpress on your hosting account.

Start a PPC campaign

Start a Pay Per Click campaign and Bid on the keyword phrases. Create new Adword groups if required. Make sure that your landing pages have good quality score before you create new ad-groups.

Spread the Word to Get Inbound Links and Word of Mouth references

Try and convince others with authority sites to link to your web pages using relevant anchor texts. Make sure that your inbound links come from good, solid sites. Impress people sufficiently enough to make them tweet or blog about your site.

Use mailing lists and social media to keep in touch with your customers and prospective customers.

This is probably the most difficult thing to do. However, you can make it easy if you network with others in your field and make intelligent use of social media.