A Quick SEO Lesson - Keeping Your Page Relevant

We all know how much the engines are loving blogs and bloggers these days. If you can’t beat them then join them…sort of.

How can you make your site that isn’t a blog more SEO-bloggish-friendly?

It is pretty simple my friend. Here are 3 tiny steps that you can implement, introduce or tweak to your existing pages to show the relevance of the content on your page or website.

#1 - Title Tags. Keep them short and to the point. Example: The title tag we use for one of our sites Hip-Hop.net is “Hip-Hop.net - Hip Hop Network”

4 keywords, not spammy and to the point including the keyword that we are trying to rank high in the SERPs for: “Hip Hop”

#2 - URL Re-Writes. I believe this is what gives the bloggers the one up on the competition because the URL usually matches the title of the blog post and the H1 header title on the page. 1+1+1 = top listing in most cases if your site is relevant to the topic being searched. Example: You knew I would have one for you to see. Do a search in Google for “implementing flash click tags“.

This page should appear as the top result (fingers crossed):
http://internetadpulse.com/design-advice/implementing-flash-click-tags/ <-- Look at the URL, it matches the keyword search string and when you click on the page the header also matches. Wordpress is like Magic huh?

#3 - H1 Tag. The old school header tag makes a comeback to the scene. Headers in old HTML mark-up are very important. Think about newspapers for a second. If they didn't have headers for the articles then you probably would just glance right over them. The Header tag lets the engines know the topic of the page content. I usually recommend using either a breadcrumb trail and having the page title at the end of the breadcrumb.

Example: Home > Design-Advice > Implementing Flash Click Tags (make this your H1 in CSS).

Check out an old client, Bag Borrow or Steal, that I did some SEO consulting for and how they do the breadcrumb trail, the title tag header on the page and the same text from the header in the URL string. Perfect execution! See this example handbag detail page: Betsy Johnson ‘Guns & Rosettes’ Hobo handbag page then do a search in Google for the keyword phrase: Betsey Johnson ‘Guns & Rosettes’ Hobo

Doesn’t it just look to easy to be true? Remember to keep your content relevant, be picky on your link trades and include your site URL in your press. Google will love you sooner or later.

-Brian Rauschenbach