Landing on the top search results of Google is every webmaster’s goal because it is linked to increased sales, profits and marketing success. An on-page Google search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, however, involves a combination of techniques specifically designed for a web page.
Principles of Google Search Engine Optimization
Relevance: Google strives to provide the most relevant search results to its users. Relevance is influenced by hundreds of factors that are captured in a mathematical formula also referred to as an algorithm.
Importance: The order of appearance in search results is also affected by importance of a web page which, for now, is equated with its popularity. The presence of quality inbound links tends to increase a website’s importance and rankings.
SEO tips
Use keywords: Keywords that buyers use to find your products or services must be incorporated in the title tag, meta description, H1 header, content’s body, image ALT attributes and page URL.
Keyword density: Use keywords at least a few times in the body of the text content but avoid stuffing as search engine crawlers are programmed to ignore a page filled with highly repetitive keywords.
Craft SEO content: Keywords must be intelligently used in text content of a web page in order to attract readers. Readers prefer original and useful content and boost SEO by sharing these in their social networks. The challenge lies in weaving targeted keywords into high quality content. Google advises that between writing for the crawlers or human readers, it prefers content that is readable to Internet users.
Review website structure: Technical elements of a web page can also prevent Google’s crawlers from storing its data. These include a site’s navigability issues, the absence of XML sitemap, text and links stored in files that do not use HTML code, no-follow links and the robots.txt files. Whenever necessary, a web page must be re-designed in order to enhance user experience and provide a clear hierarchy of links that search crawlers can easily follow.
Submit URL to directories: A well-designed and highly informative web page needs additional Internet marketing to create numerous inbound links from web pages all over the Web. Create links by adding a web page’s URL in Google, listing it in Google places and other online directories, reciprocal linking and making it available for viral sharing in social networks and document sharing sites.
Google’s algorithms have been modified several times and continue to face modification as its search engineers strive to provide 99% search results relevance. Time, practice, experience and continuous learning are necessary to master Google search engine optimization. Web page owners who are not tech savvy or who don’t have the time to monitor their site stats will need Internet marketing specialists for SEO.
