Driving high quality targeted traffic to your website is no easy feat. We all know that importance of content and off-page optimisation techniques such as backlinks. Although these are all points to focus on, just a few slight on-page tweaks can make a huge difference to gaining higher visibility in the search engines results pages (SERPS) therefore, potentially helping to increase affiliate commissions and AdSense clicks.
Title
This is probably the most important thing to do almost as soon as you create your page. Ensure your most important keyword is towards the beginning.
Description
Although this will not help your rankings, this does help Google identify what your page is about.
H1 header tags
The main title of your page should be a H1 HTML tag. This lets the search engines know what your page is about. It serves the same concept as reading a newspaper headline. The H1 heading should match your page title to increase its relevancy.
File naming conventions
To increase your chance of ranking high, ensure that your filenames match your page title and H1 tag; this should ideally all be the same. Do not use spaces but hyphens instead as these are seen as spaces. For example, www. yourdomain.com/ my-keyword-phrase.html. Also, keep your filename in the root directory or as high up the hierarchy as possible and in an ideal world, your domain name should also be keyword rich or at least contain your keyword in some way, shape or form.
Clean Code
Try and avoid using any JavaScripts, heavily nested tables or session IDs. Flash is also something which one should avoid as this causes all sorts of indexing issues although Google seems to be getting better at crawling Flash sites. If you want to specify fonts, colours, sizes and more then these can be incorporated inside CSS or external include files. This means that the Googlebot can crawl your content quickly past all the clutter and without any major problems. The more the code conforms to web standards, the better. You can visit the website of the World Wide Web Consortium (w3c) and test your site code against their many validators.
Navigational Structure
Create a site structure which the crawlers can access quickly. Try to avoid using Flash or JavaScript and stay with simple HTML keyword anchor text for maximum effect.
Image Optimisation
This can be a very powerful way to drive traffic. For example if we want to target the term ‘blue type widget’ we would save our image as blue-type-widget.jpg. We then use the keyword phrase and place it inside the ‘alt’ text and then place this code towards where the keyword is mentioned in your site content. So our code will look something like this; . If this is a low competition key phrase, then chances are you may rank high in Google images or other search engines. This is nice referral traffic and all helps towards your AdSense clicks.
Interlinking
Internal page linking can be a good way to tell Google about the theme of your pages. By using targeted relevant anchor text, you can help increase your rankings and also help to distribute any PageRank your site may have. Don’t do this to every keyword you can think of but maybe a few potential keywords in a page.
Content
This is what makes or breaks your page. All the above techniques will compliment your page and SEO efforts if you have good quality content that is relevant to your website’s theme and user’s search, this will in turn add value. They say that ‘content is king’ and this has always been the case ever since the inception of the world wide web. Don’t forget to use bold and italics to emphasise points in your content but don’t overdo it.
Whatever you decide to do, remember that to build a long-term sustainable site, one must adhere to white hat techniques and good SEO practices as this will not only build trust and credibility, but a solid foundation for your pages to rank high and earn you revenue for the future.
