Do It Yourself SEO – Web Pages, Sitemap and Validation — Part 2 of 4
Building Web Pages
Let’s hope your site was designed by following Webmaster guidelines from Google, Yahoo! and Bing. The best way to attract search traffic is to create a lot of keyword-focused, customer-centric Web pages about your product, service or niche. Remember that your long tail keywords add up and create more traffic than your highly competitive keywords. This is especially true for newer domains. You also need logical, keyword-focused site architecture with good navigation.
Title Tag: Keep your title short (65 characters or less), forming a sentence beginning with your primary keyword(s). The title is the first thing users see in the SERPs so be descriptive and enticing. Create unique title tags for every page.
Meta Description: Create your description tag to attract users. Use keywords as soon as possible and keep it short (150 characters or less) since snippets can be truncated by the search engines.
Header: Include primary keywords, spark interest, keep it short and relevant. Use only one H1 tag per page.
Body Text: Create pages that have a purpose for your visitors and are focused on 2 to 3 primary keywords. Include your primary keyword at the beginning and at end of the page. Support your primary keywords with related keywords to establish context and facilitate spidering. Close with a call to action. Write in conversational style while focusing on the needs of customer and search spiders. Let your headers organize the copy with the use of bullets and bold text for emphasis. Leave plenty of white space. Use anchor text for internal and external linking and vary your anchor text by using related keywords.
Internal Links: Link relevant pages to each other internally throughout site content. Ensure keyword-focused anchor text is relevant to the destination page. Use navigation text links rather than images or Javascript. Use breadcrumb links, subject/topic group links, and sitemap links.
External Links: Get listed in DMOZ and quality directories in your niche. When looking for one-way links, search your primary keywords to identify competitors, then find out who is linking to them. Create a list and be prepared to offer something of value in return for a static link with relevant anchor text. Start a business blog and post valuable information on other blogs relevant to your business. Write hot content in your area of expertise and submit to relevant publications or post on your blog.
Images: Use images to lend credibility to your content and create interest. Keep image size to a minimum for fast display. Use relevant alt text.
Sitemap: Create a sitemap of all the pages in your site to reveal link structure. This helps search spiders find all relevant pages of your site available for crawling.
Site Validation: Ensure your pages are indexable and links can be followed with the free W3C Markup Validation Service.
Doing it yourself takes time, but there are tools out there that can save you time. Part 3 is about SEO Tools.