How to optimise my web page content Part II

L: Ooh, that sounds nice! How much does it cost?

J: We are happy to give any hosted client a free upgrade if they want to get stuck into this.

L: I am thinking it might be best to work with an example here. So let's say I want to know how to optimise my web page content and the phrase I have chosen to highlight is "piano tuner in london". We can assume that I have managed to smuggle it into the main text as naturally as possible, where do I go from here?

J: A good next step is to ensure that it appears in the main title of the page (this is what we call the h1 tag).

L: Right, so the main page title should be the exact phrase?

J: Ideally, yes. If possible, use the full phrase by itself without any other words but of course that doesn't always look good in every situation. So my advice would be to always use as many of the same words as possible in as close to the same order as possible and as close to the beginning of the title as possible.

L: I see, so the maybe a good page title could be "Piano tuner in London receives award for quality!"

J: Exactly, that would be very good. In fact the more of the whole key phrase you can get into the beginning of the main h1 page title the better. There are always cases where people will feel the need to compromise but it still helps to put in as much of it as you can.

L: I guess one issue there is that the word "London" could put off potential clients from different towns or regions. Ultimately, the main page title isn't just about search engines but also presentation so compromising on that would be understandable.

J: I think that's a very fair point. But the good news is that you can often make up for that by including "London" in other parts of your page such as the main text. For me, the next big place to include it is known as the TITLE element, not to be confused with the main h1 page title.

L: Okay, so is that a visible part of the page?

J: Kind of, it appears above the whole web page, usually in the bar at the top of your screen. A lot of people don't notice this one so much so it's an opportunity to use the full key phrase and worry less about how it comes across. Having just said that, it does tend to appear in the actual search result.

L: I wouldn't worry about that so much because if someone is actually searching for that phrase it won't bother them to see it come up in results, if anything they are more likely to click.

J: I agree. And - to tie in to your previous point - if you do have more locations to add then having a short list of them at the end of your TITLE element can also be a good strategy.

L: Oh, so with this element I can even put in something like "Piano tuner in London Croydon Surrey"?

J: That can certainly make a difference to those searching for your services when keying in those other locations. But remember that the closer the words in the TITLE element are to the one, single search phrase the better are the chances of optimising that particular key phrase. By combining extra words and phrases you can sometimes dilute your chances with any single phrase.

L: Sounds like a bit of a dilemma! Is there any good rule of thumb?

J: Personally, I would stick with one search phrase, use it twice in the text, include it in the main h1 page title and then maybe append just a couple of locations onto the end of it in the TITLE element as well.

L: Fair enough. I can see from this discussion that there is a lot you can do to get your key phrase into the page content.

J: Definitely, and in fact there is even more because we also let clients put the phrase into a special metakeywords element, though the significance of this may be less important nowadays.

L: We have certainly covered a lot. Is there anything else you can do with your page content to increase your chances?

J: Editing the description of your page is certainly recommended. If you have already included the phrase in all the other areas then it might be overkill to put it into the page description as well but I certainly believe that having a unique description for the page is something that can get you brownie points. It's also worth having around 400-600 words of text on the page and describing any displayed images.

L: So if I do all of these things I am on the right track?

J: Very much so, they can make a big difference, although you also need to have good incoming links to your website and to ensure that the technical side is being looked after properly. We can obviously ensure that when our clients use our system their phrases appear in exactly the right tags and using an easy-to-crawl page layout.

L: I guess there is always more going on behind the scenes.

J: Absolutely, and getting your website designed and managed by a standards-aware company is the first step. But getting the page content right is an essential part of the process and something that you can easily improve without any serious technical knowledge.

Back to Part I of How to Optimise my web page content