engines use heading tags to tell them of the relative importance of text on a webpage. Your webpage readings should include the most relevant keyword phrases and be wrapped in heading tags, like this:
<h1>Most relevant keywords</h1>
<h2>Second most relevant keyword phrases</h2>
<h3>Third most relevant keyword phrases</h3>
The best way to optimize the headings on your page is by assigning a heading tag for various relevant paragraphs within your content. The most important tag is the <h1> and is used at the top of the page.
<h1>Fundraising Ideas</h1>
The rest of the heading tags can be used for specific short phrases describing the previous tag and the content associated. For example:
<h2>Easy Fundraising Ideas</h2>
Follow up with a <h3> heading further down the page that drills down further, such as:
<h3>How Do I Start My Own Fundraiser?</h3>
Keep in mind that your headings must always describe the paragraph or paragraphs that follow it.
Bold, italic, underline, bullet points: Search engines also pay attention to the tags for bold <b>, italic <i>, underline <u>, and bullet points. Use these features to highlight search terms, but be sure to do so tastefully.
Internal linking: One of the best-kept secrets to advanced optimization is internal linking between pages. Internal linking between pages helps Google as well as other search engines understand the relevancy of keywords or keyword phrases to your page content by using what’s called “anchor text”—the text that visitors click on to go to another page. For example, let’s say you have a page that talks about fundraising for elementary schools. This text can be linked to another relevant page on your website that describes fundraising ideas for kids in school like this:
This is a great way to connect relevant content within a website and target additional keyword phrases.
You may want to use descriptive phrases to link between pages. For example: the easiest way to raise money for school would be a great anchor text link to a page that talks about raising money for schools.
Internal linking is also a great way to introduce pages deep within your site (that is, pages that would otherwise take four or more clicks to reach from the home page), so that search engines can crawl and index them.
Image ALT tag: Sometimes, search engines are specifically looking for images, so optimizing your images for these searches can help you reach new customers via image channels like Google Images and Bing Images. The best way to optimize an image is by describing the picture in a few words (focusing on your main keywords, of course). For example, let’s say we have an image showing Boy Scouts collecting money for their fundraiser. This would be a good picture to optimize for “boy scouts fundraising ideas.” The HTML code will look like this:
<img src=”boy-scouts-fundraiser.jpg” alt=”boy scouts fundraising ideas” />
On-page factors are a great way to tell the search engines what your site is about but stay true to your target audience; optimize your pages with the most relevant keywords related to the content of the page. Do not optimize your page for apples when you’re talking about oranges.
Link Building
Link building—the process of getting links back to your site placed on other sites in order to increase your site’s rank with search engines—is one of the most misunderstood areas of Search Engine Optimization. Let’s start by defining what “backlinks” are.
Backlinks are links that point to a website. Let’s say a webpage includes the text “RecipesABC has the best chocolate cake recipes in the world” and the words “chocolate cake recipes” link back to www.RecipesABC.com (not an actual site).
What does that mean to search engines?
By providing a link back to RecipesABC.com with the anchor text “chocolate cake recipes,” we are telling search engines that RecipesABC.com is relevant to “chocolate cake recipes.” The search engines register this as a vote for RecipesABC.com’s web popularity, which affects its rank among other relevant sites with the same anchor text “chocolate cake recipes.” The more votes to your site, the better rankings your website will achieve when users search “chocolate cake recipes.”
Here are a few important factors to remember about link building:
Relevancy: Always seek backlinks from relevant websites. If you have a website that sells a dessert recipe book, make sure to seek links from websites that are relevant to your topic, i.e., other recipe websites, book stores, chef’s blogs, home cooking, bakeries nearby, and so on. Their “votes” will mean more to search engines on the subjects you’re targeting.
You can use www.dmoz.org to find more topics relevant to the theme of your site.
Website authority: One of the most important things to remember about link building is that not all links are created equal. In the eyes of search engines, a link pointing to your website from the New York Times is a lot more authoritative than a link from a website that was created yesterday.
You can use http://who.is to discover who owns a website and when it was created, among other relevant details.
Note: Beware of link farms! A link farm is a website set up with the sole purpose of increasing incoming links for other websites. These sites are usually made up of long lists of unrelated links and are considered a form of spam.
User experience: Google, as well as other search engines, are looking for websites that provide the best user experience. If users can’t find what they are looking for, search engines will consider the site less trustworthy. If you see a site that is not so user-friendly, skip your link-building efforts there and focus instead on sites that provide a friendlier user experience.
There are many ways to build links back to your site. Here are a few ideas:
• Reach out to relevant blog owners and pitch an interesting story.
• Share your website content on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, and via quality social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.
• Add sharing options on your website to make it easier for other people to share your stories via social bookmarking sites, social media sites, and email.
• Participate in group discussions and forums related to your industry.
• Participate in Q&A sites, like Yahoo Answers, WikiAnswers, and Quora.
• Contribute to relevant blogs by posting comments on their stories.
• Connect with others whose sites share the same theme or niche as your website and offer them a reason to link back to you.
