The Essential 2007 Code Optimization Tutorial for SEO

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Do you want to get the traffic you deserve flooding into your
website? Code optimization is an essential component of the
search engine optimization process and if you aren't technically
minded then it can be difficult to get your head round. This
guide is meant for beginners and more advanced webmasters alike.

A shallow knowledge of HTML coding is useful, however, it is not
necessary. Optimizing your code can be done by simply opening
your html document in a text editor and changing different parts
as shown below. Follow these steps carefully and your code will
become 100% search engine optimized and ready for promotion and
link-building campaigns.


The steps below assume you have chosen the keywords which you
want to optimize the page code for. If you have not done that,
go and do that now and return to this guide later.

HTML Code Optimization

The optimization of your HTML code for search engines is vital.
It is the base of your SEO campaign. It must be optimized in a
number of ways in order to improve the relevance of a chosen
keyword. Follow the advice below as closely as possible. The
closer the better and the higher your rank will be.

Remember: Keywords are the words people will use in search
engines. Including a keyword in your site content (and
optimizing your site) will cause your site to be returned as
a search result. You can choose to optimize your page for a
keyword or a keyphrase (a number of related words, eg: 'free red
hats'). Using a keyphrase is more advantageous (as discussed
later) but for simplicity, I will refer to keywords AND
keyphrases as just keywords.

TIP: Try to optimize each page for just one keyword. This
will stop each keyword competing against each other for
weightings and you will rank higher for the chosen keyword.

The TITLE Tag

Location: just below the tag

Web Promotion, Affiliate Marketing, SEO' for example

1. The title tag should not contain any of the words Google
disregards. These are words like 'and', 'not', 'a', 'the',
'about' etc which are too common for Google to take any notice
of. Using these words will dilute the importance that your
keyword is given in your title (if you put it in your title).
These words are known as 'stop' words.

2. Include your keyword in the title of your page. Including
other words in your title that are not your chosen keyword/s
will be detrimental to your ranking. This is because it makes
your keyword seem less relevant to the title of the page. This
relevance is known as 'weight'. The more weight your keyword has
in a certain criteria the better.

3. Don't include the name of your website in the title of
your page: for example 'Share The Wealth – affiliate marketing'.
This is because it will dilute the prominence of your keyword
(in this example 'affiliate marketing'). It is tempting to
include your site's name as it may look better, however it is
not that important as people don't pay much attention to the
title.

The Meta tags

Location: just below the title tag.

Meta data appears as follows:

meta name="Description" content="Free articles and guides on affiliate marketing and SEO"

meta name="Keywords" content="Affiliate Marketing,SEO"

1. This is where you specify your keywords:
meta name="Keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3"
Also, weight is given to how near your keyword is to the
beginning of your keywords list. So you should try to have
your most important keyword in the place of 'keyword1' in the
above example.

meta name="Description" content="Free articles and guides on affiliate marketing and SEO"

1. The above line is where the description, shown in google
results, is written. It goes after content=". Do not worry about
keyword weighting in here as search engines do not take this into
consideration anymore.

The BODY of your HTML

Once you have written the content of your page, you can begin
SEO on it. Complete the page ready for publishing and then apply
the following rules to it to ensure its optimized 100% for the
top search engines.

1. Your keyword should appear in bold at least once on your
page. This will show the search engines that the word, your
keyword, is important to the subject of your page and so must
be relevant to the keyword search performed by the search
engine user.

2. Your keyword should have a weight of 2% on your page. This is
the ideal percentage as if it is too high a search engine may
penalize your page for spamming. Spamming is a term used to
describe the action of webmasters that trick search engine page
ranking systems (SEPRS) into thinking they are relevant in order
to get a high ranking. These pages will not usually be relevant
at all and simply "cash in" selling advertising space with the
high traffic they receive. Spamming is increasingly becoming a
thing of the past as the search engine page ranking algorithms
become more sophisticated. To work out the percentage weight
your keyword has, visit www.live-keyword-analysis.com .

3. Use heading tags (

heading

etc) and put your keyword
into the heading. Again the usual weighting rules exist. Have
your keyword as close to the beginning of the heading and have
as few other words in the heading as possible. Position this
heading as close to the top of your page as you can for increased
relevance.

4. Put your keyword in up to three of the alt attributes for
images and include it in one of the first three alt image
attributes in your code. Alt image attributes are the alt tags
given to images in your code which can be seen if the image
fails to load. These are great for hosting your keyword as users
cannot usually see them. Don't spam though, stick to three alt
tags. Alt tags are used as follows:

img src="http://www2.blogger.com/imagename.gif" alt="alt-text-here" height="image-height" width="image-width" /

5. Keep your page content between 100 and 1400 words. This is
for a number of reasons, including the size of Google's page
cache (amount of data from a page Google stores). If you have
too much content, you could try splitting the page into two
separate pages and perhaps having a 'page 2' link at the bottom
of the content.

6. Your keyword should appear at the beginning of your content
and at the end (The first and last 50 words)

Code Optimization Checklist

* No stop words in your title tag

* Keyword included in title

* Website name not included in title

* Keyword in meta keywords list

* Keyword placed as close to the beginning of the meta
keywords list as possible

* Keyword appears in bold at least once in the content

* Keyword has a 2% weight

* Keyword is in the first heading tag and is at the top
of the page content

* Keyword is in the first 50 words and last 50 words of
the page

* Page content is between 100 and 1400 words

* Keyword is in one of the first three alt image
attributes and is in three of them in total

Tips and Advice

• Try to optimize each page for just one keyword. This will
stop each keyword competing against each other for
weightings and prominence and you will rank higher for the
chosen keyword.

• Not every page of your site will be able to be optimized
for every criterion. Don't worry; just try to hit each
criteria as best you can. Sometimes you won't be able to
achieve a content size of above 100 words: on a contacts
page for example. Issues like this are of little importance
as not every page will have a particular need for perfect
optimization, because surfers will find contact information
from a link shown on the home page.

• Constantly check your competition. You may not feel it is
possible to get onto the first page on Google for a certain
keyword/phrase. Choose a less contested keyword.
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Article by James Kinsley search engine optimization
(http://www.sharethewealth.co.uk/) expert and web promotion
(http://www.sharethewealth.co.uk/) specialist.
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