SEO Tips & Information

The following factors are thought to have the most positive effect on search engine optimisation. The factors are listed in order of importance.

Title Text

The HTML title tag for the page: <title>A Title</title>.

Use 10 to 80 characters for the title and include up to 3 search terms. The terms near the start of the tag are probably more important. Use - or | to delimit search terms, e.g.

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By default, Wordpress doesn’t include wonderful titles for blog posts. Using plugins, a lot can be done to improve the page titles of Wordpress blog posts.

The URL

Making the URL name match a search keyword or phrase, e.g. the name of this page is top-10-seo-factors and should be more likely to turn up in a search for the phrase “top 10 seo factors“.

The keywords should be as near the start of the URL as possible.

It is probable that separating words by hyphens in the URL can makes it easier for search engines to distinguish words.

The Domain Name

For a similar reason to the URL name.

Note: Be careful in choosing a domain name that matches a phrase you think users will search for. If the emphasis of your website changes you may be stuck with an inappropriate domain name, e.g. you might have started with www dot wedding-cakes…. and then later on decide it would have been better to start with www dot .party-catering….. In this example, it might be better to start with:

www.party-catering….

and have an page on the site such as:

Anchor Text on Inbound link

When a page has a hyperlink to another page, the text associated with the link says what the vote is for. The more appropriate the link text is the better. See making a link count for more information.

Link Popularity

The number of backlinks to the web page from other websites. See PageRank for more information.

Keywords on Page

Use your keywords throughout the page. However, write the text in a fashion that looks natural to the reader. If a page has a clearly defined topic then the text on the page will naturally contain relevant and meaningful keywords and phrases in the correct proportions.

Keywords in H1, H2 and H3 HTML tags

It is important to include keywords in the titles on the page. A page should have one h1 tag near the top. The tag should include the first keyword/ phrase used in the page’s title.

Keyword use in Alt and Image Titles

This can be an important way of including variations on your keywords and phrases, e.g. the main text in the page might say “top 10 SEO factors” but an Alt might have a variation such as “top 10 factors affecting SEO”. See Using Alt and Title text for more information.

strong>Keywords in bold/ strong format

Writing keywords and phrases in bold highlights their importance to search engines. Do this once or twice but don’t bold every occurrence.

Keywords in meta description tag

Include a meaning page description. Make sure the description matches the topic on the page. Don’t include words and phrases that don’t appear in the main text of the page.

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