A very prominent factor in writing good SEO content is not to write specifically for search engines alone. Search engine algorithms are now capable of distinguishing content that is generated for them and not their website visitors. Over the last 5 years most search engines have become noticeably better at telling the difference between SEO spam v.s the content of legitimate websites. By following this basic list of SEO best practices your content will perform much better with search engines like Google, yahoo and Bing.

Use keywords and key phrases in the title tags of your web pages

The most important ‘on page optimization’ techniques is the title tag. Write your title using the keywords that you are targeting. The sooner the keyword appears the better off you are. The title tag should also be kept between 60 – 90 characters in length.

Example Title Tag:

<title>Temecula Web Design, Web Hosting and SEO Services </title>

Create unique title tags for each page

This will both increase you chances of getting multiple listings for your website and gives you the opportunity to create variable but similar key phrases.

Accurately describe your web page’s content in your title tag

Doing this increases your ranking by establishing relevancy to your content, keywords and other SEO tags. Not doing this not only hurts your ranking but also can penalize you for appearing to spam or trick the search engines.

Match the title tag with the h1 and h2 tags as much as possible

Example h1 and h2 Tags:

• <h1> Temecula Web hosting Solutions</h1>
• <h1> Temecula Web Design Services</h1>
• <h2> Temecula SEO Services</h2>

Your most prominent keywords should appear in the first 100 words of your website content

Example of keywords in web page content

I am a web designer. My name is Sean Murphy and I specialize in creating dynamic web site and printed media solutions. I am a Temecula-based designer, but design for clients in San Diego, Los Angeles, Riverside and Orange County.

My clients range from law firms to wineries and the wine industry to non-profit organizations and a variety of niche products and services. I have successfully launched web sites with custom designs and integrated SEO best practices to optimize client search engine ranking

Keyword repetition and density

Although search engines do not measure keyword density, repeating keywords the right amount of times will help increase you ranking. Be very careful though, too much repetition and your website can be labeled as spam. Alternatively, too little keyword repetition and you may loose significant SEO Ranking.

Use strong or em along with bullet points

Emphasizing text with Strong or em is a great idea. You can highlight the keyword or whole sentence containing keywords. Research has shown that italic usually works better than bold. Mainly because people know bold influenced the search engines and abused its use.

The use of images and ALT text

All images can have a distinct filename and “alt” attribute, both of which you should take
advantage of. The “alt” attribute allows you to specify alternative text for the image if it cannot be displayed for some reason. This alternative tag gives you the opportunity to reiterate your keywords but only if it’s both short and descriptive of the image.

Example Alt Tag

<img src=””linux-server.jpg”” alt=””Linux web hosting server” />

Beware, making your Alt tags too long, keyword heavy or repetitive can produce the opposite effect by being labeled as spam by search engines.

In my next article:

I’ll cover anchor text, page descriptions and social media to increase page rank and SEO.