SEO for Beginners - Part 3 - Title Tags and Web Design

This is the third article in our series about SEO help for beginners. You can find parts 1 and 2 right on hubpages. In this article, we will look at the two types of SEO and focus on the first type, which is on-page optimization.

Two Types of SEO

There are two main categories of SEO: on-page and off-page.On-page refers to the actual code and content of your web pages. Off-page refers to factors that affect the ranking of your web pages that aren’t determined by the actual code of your web pages. We’ll look at both, but in this article we're going to focus on on-page optimization. The next article in this series will focus on off-page.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO has to do with a few key things including the words you use, website design and how you organize your website.

Every web page has a number of key places that are especially important for search engines.These include:

Title tags – The text that appears between the HTML title tages, e.g. <title>YOUR KEYPHRASES HERE</title>

Meta tags - The text that appears between the tags, e.g. <meta name="description" content=" YOUR PAGE DISCRIPTION HERE " />

<meta name="keywords" content="YOUR KEYWORDS HERE" />

Headings - The text that appears between your heading tags, particularly your first heading i.e. <h1>YOUR KEYWORD RICH HEADLINE HERE</h1>

Page content - The actual text on your page. Make your content keyword rich but don't overuse the keywords and make sure it is written in plain English.

(Note: If you want more help with this, then do a google search for the terms and HTML tutorials, e.g. search for “meta tags HTML tutorial”).

For SEO, the text within all these areas should contain the targeted keywords for which you want your site to rank. And remember, don’t spam the search engines by overusing keywords, or by using keywords that aren’t relevant to your page.

You also want to focus on how you organize your website. You want to organize the categories of your website based on your targeted keywords. That will allow the search engines to recognize your website’s theme and rank it high for your target market.

Finally, look at the design of your website. There are some design elements that can have a negative impact on SEO. For instance, search engines find Flash files and Java code hard to read, so that websites that rely heavily on Flash or Java can find that they do not rank very high with search engines.

Below is a great video by Jill Whalen who reviews some common SEO design issues.

Above all, keep this in mind. While SEO is important, focus on your content first. It's hard to write your best content when trying to optimize for SEO at the same time. Focus on creating useful content that will be a genuine benefit for your target market. Once you have done that, then you can go back over the article as a second step and apply some SEO techniques.

In our next article, we will look at off-page SEO techniques. In the meantime, if you have any questions, comments or feedback, please let me know. I value your comments.

To your success!

Cindy Schulson helps solo entrepreneurs find and attract their ideal niche so they can market themselves authentically and get faster results. Finding the right key words is an important part of attracting your niche -- you have to understand what keywords your target market is looking for. 

Get Cindy's free report "Ten Steps to Finding and Attracting Your Ideal Niche" for a step-by-step guide that will help all of your marketing be laser focused.