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If you’ve started your SEO education, then you already know there are two major factors that comprise search engine optimization…onpage factors and offpage factors. Today, I’d like to share the 8 things your normal blogging habits should include to make sure you master the Onpage Factors

Title Tag

The number one onpage SEO tactic to have is meaningful, keyword rich, descriptive titles for each blog post, blog page and search/archive page in your blog.

Be advised though, Google is onto those *black-hat* tactics like keyword stuffing, so the title should read naturally. Using the same word over and over in your title will get your site banned. Period.

Words closer to the beginning of the title, are given more *weight* than those that are at the end. So, make sure your title gets to the point, quickly.

“I’m blogging, I can’t control the title that appears at the top of the blog window, can I?”

Well, actually, if you are using Wordpress right out of the box, probably not. However, there are a number of ways to enhance the title tag, or browser window title with plugins. A couple that come immediately to mind are All In One SEO Pack and HeadSpace2. Both offer customizations that will ensure your title tags contain the right information, as long as your post or page title does. Both of the plugins I mentioned, also help with the next few factors as well.

Description Meta Tag

Yeah, I know. You’ve probably only heard of this one. The Description Meta Tag is not something humans normally see, unless they are looking for it. It’s purpose is to speak to the *spiders* that crawl your site. It was originally designed as a helpful way to explain the content of the post or page.

When Google finds a description meta tag, it will use the first 160 characters to display the *description* that appears under the link when your site is returned in the results for a search term.

It is important to note this tag is more than a way to explain your content to the search spiders then…it’s a way to talk to your target market, and explain why they should come read your content.

If you don’t provide a description meta tag, Google will grab either the first 160 characters of your content, or 160 character near the keyword that was searched … to find your content. Leaving it for Google to *build* your description is a little like relying on someone who hasn’t seen the movie, to tell you if it worth seeing. Hmmm.

Keywords Meta Tag

This search engine optimization factor is getting some bad press, and experts are unable to agree on the validity and importance of this one. However, for years, Google, Yahoo and MSN used the keyword meta tag to help them weight your content based on the keywords found.

Here’s my thinking on this matter.

Having 3-7 of your main keywords related to the content in this tag won’t hurt you, and very well might still be ranked pretty high on the internal thinking of spiders who index your site.

Header Tags

I don’t want this to become a tutorial on HTML or anything silly like that, but you need to know something about how web browsers *read* the content and display it to you. They use a *tag* system that allows them to define how something will appear, on the fly. For example, to make the word bold, appear in bold in a sentence, an instruction (a tag) is placed right in front of the word and immediately following the word.

For example, this word will appear bold when read by a browser.

Now that you understand that concept (yeah right, clear as mud, right?), there are tags used by all browsers to display text at various heights. In fact, there is a standard set of header tags, numbering 1 through 6, (with 1 being the largest, 6 being the smallest) that every browser understands.

With me so far?

When you put a keyword in a header tag, it is given more *weight* on the relevancy scale, than that same word just appearing in the text. A header tag automatically tells Google it’s more important.

Alt Tags

An Alt tag is a small bit of text that is displayed in place of an image, until the image loads. Perhaps you have surfed a site and seen text just kinda hanging out in space, and then, when the page finished loading, a photo magically appeared instead of that text.

You are seeing the Alt tag at work.

Since photo’s can be large and take longer to download to the local surfer’s machine, Alt tags let them know something is coming.

However, the Google spiders crawl Alt tags and if your keyword is there, it’s like another small vote in your favor. Again, I remind you that Google is onto the *black-hatters* that stuff keywords in the Alt tag, just to get better rankings.

A good rule to follow would be to use the title as the Alt tag, and add the word photo. For example..you have a post called *7 Travel Destinations Everyone Can Afford*, and it displays a beautiful photo of the beaches of Fiji. For the Alt tag of that photo, insert the text *7 Travel Destinations Everyone Can Afford Photo*.

Please note, your photo names can also help your SEO. Just name the photo the same as the title as well, and add the word photo. For the photo name though, you will want to replace all spaces with dashes. Although there a couple of plugins I have seen for this task, I have had problems with them and the new version of Wordpress. If I hear of one that rises back to the top again, I will let you know.

Link Text

Also called Anchor text, this is the text that is displayed when you include a hyperlink in your content.

Let’s say you have a site all about Pool Service. And within a blog post, you are sharing your experience with a great vendor that offers overnight delivery for their supplies. If you will include keywords within your text (rather than just *click here*), a few things happen for you.

• You have your keywords included again on your page (in natural sounding language)
• You are linking to an outside site (that might have a great page rank) that is related. So, you are *voting* for the other site.
• The vendor you are linking to get’s some business, making them happier with you
• Google sees you now, as more of an authority on the subject, since you are a linking to another known authority.

This habit is all on you. I know of no plugins to help with this process… just remember, the better the anchor text you highlight for a link, the better all around it will be.

Sitemap

I should mention that there are two types of sitemaps. One, is built for humans. The other, is built for the search engine spiders. I am referring to the one for Google here, although, it’s a really good idea to have a good sitemap for your visitors as well.

This one requires a bit of work unless you choose a plugin to handle it for you. In fact, I highly recommend using a plugin since getting the priorities, scheduling, category hierarchy and other obscure and difficult to follow factors go into this.

A sitemap built for Google looks like raw HTML code. In fact, it’s called XML and is a cousin to HTML. It basically recounts everything that Google can expect to find on your site. Again, unless you are really really into that geeky stuff, I highly recommend a plugin for your blog to handle this chore. Google XML Sitemaps is a good one that comes to mind.

Good Content

Obviously, this really should be weighted very high on the scale of things to do to bring visitors to your site. None of the Onpage optimizations you do will keep your visitors on your site or coming back like delivering some killer content.

Need a few ideas? Try Google Alerts.

Here are the links to the plugins mentioned above: 
All In One SEO Pack 
HeadSpace2

In commercial life there are the ‘amateur’ writers, the managers for whom routine writing is just one activity (and often not their core skill). And then there are the professional copywriters, both employed or freelance. They can all claim to be ‘business writers’ or ‘BWs’; but what can such a writer bring to your organisation?

How professional copywriting can help you

Most working people can write. If all you do is draft routine reports and emails, your basic writing skills should be sufficient. Most of us drive cars too, but we’d be rubbish at the wheel of a Formula 1 car. It’s the same for specialist commercial writing (for instance, press releases, website SEO copywriting, or technical copywriting). For best results leave the Grand Prix to Lewis Hamilton and your copywriting to a specialist writing partner.

A good professional writer complements your skills

The right choice of writer brings valuable specialist skills and experience to your company. How often have you wished you had more time to get words working for you? Whether you need search engine friendly SEO website copy, or a client case study, a good copywriter can help you get promotional ideas off your to-do list and working for you. Furthermore, their input frees you up to add more value for your organisation. And if they’re freelance, you’ll get writing power when you need it, but without the overhead when you don’t. Just as you’d hire a Cheltenham based accountant, printer or legal adviser, hiring a specialist makes sense for your copywriting too.

What do business writers do?

Whether employed or freelance, ‘BWs’ are professional communicators. Based on your brief they’ll create or manipulate written information (often working with local website designers and other creative professionals). Whether they’re writing for a small local company or a multinational with a local presence, these commercial writers emphasise product and service benefits and provoke responses. Anything, in fact, from helping customers understand what you do to helping them decide to buy. Ultimately, as professional copywriters we’re all writing to sell.

What background should my writer have?

As a Cheltenham, Gloucestershire based business copywriter with more than 25 years’ experience, I’d suggest that the best commercial writers also have substantial career experience beyond crafting words. In my particular case it’s a unique combination of technical sales, marketing management, technical writing, PR and copywriting experience – allied to an unbridled passion for written communication and writing in general.

So, whether you’re promoting Gloucestershire, a Cheltenham start-up, or a brand as big and prominent as Toyota (I’ve written for all three), isn’t it time you enjoyed the benefits of your own professional writing partner?

Find yours now!

There are numerous ways to get free traffic to your website. This free traffic is very important, obviously because it cuts the amount of money that you need to budget for advertising dramatically – or it enables you to spend more advertising dollars on paid advertising media. Google plays an important role in terms of generating free traffic.

Using natural search marketing techniques, which basically employ search engine optimization techniques, you can move your website listing up through the ranks in the Google search engine.

This search engine optimization includes both on-page optimization, as well as off-page optimization, where you get one-way, inbound links to your site on important websites that already have high search engine listing for their keywords.

Essentially, you make sure that your HTML code is clean, that you have used your keywords effectively within your content, that your links are anchored with your keywords in the text, that you use your keywords in the ‘alt’ tags, that you use meta tags, and that your keyword is included in the title tag of your page, as well as in bold, with an H1 or H2 HTML tag on the content portion of your page.

But once you get traffic, you need to learn how to maximize it. Set up an opt-in page, which may also be called a capture page, a squeeze page, or a gateway page, which your visitors will go through before getting to your website content. This page will request the visitor’s first name and email address, and if you are offering them something for free in exchange, such as an E-Book or report, they will happily provide you with this information.

This information is then sent to your auto responder, where you can market to these visitors over and over again, bringing them back to your site again and again, without having to get them to come back to you through the search engine.

By capturing names and email addresses in this way, you can truly maximize the free traffic that you are getting from Google, and you will find that you have more repeat visitors, which in turn amounts to more sales.

Have you seen those websites that contain hundreds of content pages? Do you wonder how people put those sites up so fast? It’s a lot easier than you think, if you use the right strategy for building content rich web sites.

First, when building a content rich website, instead of using the outdated method of doing each page, one at a time, use the technology that we have today to your advantage.

You can create, find, or buy a website template, where you just paste content in, but that is still too slow for many.

The best option today is to use a content management system, such as Joomla. You can find or buy existing templates that can be plugged into your CMS, or you can have one designed specifically – and only – for you and your website – one that is truly unique.

When you use a content management system like this, getting the content up on your site is fast and easy. Just paste it into the form within the administrative area of the site, tell the system where you want it linked, and submit it. You’re done! But where are you going to get hundreds of pages of content fast?

You have four viable options: You can write the content yourself, you can hire someone else to write it for you, you can use free content that you find on the Internet, or you can buy private label rights content and either rewrite it or have someone else rewrite it.

The first option, writing the content yourself, is of course the slowest way to get content for your site. But if you hire people to write it for you, you could assign 10 writers 50 articles each, and have 500 articles to use for content in about a week’s time. All you have to do is login and put it on the site.

Using free content, while acceptable, is a bad idea. You will be publishing content that has already been published, and the search engines will penalize your site for having duplicate content in terms of where you will rank in their listings. If you are not depending on the search engines for traffic, however, this is an option.

Finally, consider using private label rights content. This content must be rewritten, in most cases, but again, if you employ some writers to rewrite the content for you, the work will be good to use, and it will be much cheaper than having fresh content written – and usually much faster as well.