Your home page content is a separate animal to be sure so it merit’s a separate discussion.  This is important both to search engines and readers, however there is nothing more important as far as capturing the attention of our human readers.

Everything Is Evolving

Before I get into that in detail though, I want to talk a bit more about the changing landscape of home pages, inner pages, and SEO in general, as it is very important that we view all of this with perception and reason working in our favor.

It used to be not that long ago that pretty much all of your visitors started out at your homepage, which was mostly due to authority playing such a big role in SEO.  So people would look to put all their eggs in one basket as far as the main keywords they were targeting, and you pretty much had to unless you had a huge link building budget.

So if you looked to spread things around more, your home page would be able to complete less, meaning that the home pages of other sites would beat you out due to your not focusing as much on your home page.  Your inner pages where you directed this additional off page SEO focus, by pointing links to them, would be way out of their league against these home pages from other sites, with their cannons versus the pea shooters you’d have on the other pages.

Now these interior pages was where the real content was, so things were certainly out of whack when home pages had to show down against each other for keywords that they didn’t really have much or even no content to showcase, aside from strategically placed keywords on the home page, in addition to all of the other on page optimizing techniques that we’ve spoken about already.

The Evolving Landscape Of SEO

As the years pass, changes in the way search engines rank pages have continued to evolve.  A lot of webmasters and affiliates live in fear of these changes and updates, and we’ve seen some lately from Google in particular which have many people in a tizzy.

These changes have all been directed toward making search results more deserved, at least as far as looking to cut down on the amount of gaming that webmasters engage in.  So certain link schemes have been discredited, departures from natural language as far as loading up keywords in your content is no longer rewarded as it was, sites which just repost content instead of creating their own original content have been devalued, interior pages where the real content resides have been given more of a fighting chance, and so on.

All of these changes should be welcomed by those of us who are truly looking to create quality websites, and to those who aren’t, well the goal of searches is to try to separate the wheat from the chaff, and if you are producing mostly chaff, well you simply need to look to raise your standards.  If you are unable to, then perhaps you don’t belong in this business in the first place.

This progression though hasn’t been a very drastic one as many believe, and in fact have only addressed the fringes of SEO.  So if you did well just posting other people’s content, you already had to deal with this content being worth less, so if it then becomes worth even less, then that shouldn’t really surprise you.

The Short Term, The Long Term, and the Now of SEO

If you passed a bunch of sites by literally peppering your content with keywords, to the point that even kids can tell this wasn’t written for people but instead search engines, then it only makes sense that it’s just a matter of time before this gets less rewarded, and that’s only fair in fact.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve always looked to optimize and there have been times where this sort of thing was optimal.  There was even a time where hidden text was optimal, and I used it, although this was quite a few years ago.  Our job as SEO practitioners in fact is to seek out what works best at any given time, and not necessarily to look too far ahead.

You probably have seen people wagging their fingers at affiliates who they believe aren’t focused on the long term enough.  So for instance they tell you not to engage in activities that they believe will have less value at some point in the future.  You really do want to be wary of this type of advice though, and although forward thinking has merit, you definitely do not want to throw out the baby with the bath water.

The baby is, of course, not the short or long term of SEO, it is the NOW of SEO.  In any business, it is the current business conditions that need to be our starting point, where we first look to figure out what the heck is going on now.  A little down the road is important too, and far down the road has its merits as well, but if we want to optimize we need to learn on how to do it now.

Business Success is Always A Matter Of Satisfying, Then Adjusting

If we ran a store and had items that don’t really sell now, but we guess that they might later on, it really would make no sense to try to sell these forward looking items at the present time.  Rather, we need to work with what is working now, with an eye to the kind of adjustments we may need to make down the road, so we can be more prepared to put this change into practice.

The same holds true with search engine optimization, where we both need to optimize now, and also look to adjust to changing conditions as they occur.  So the plan is to be correct and effective now, and also look to make corrections as you go so you can continue to be effective.

If you listen to a lot of these people though, they don’t want you to optimize now, they want you to intentionally place yourself in a position of disadvantage and make guesses at the future and look to conform with that.

This is pure nonsense and is made even worse by an obvious lack of reasoning and in fact not even an attempt at it.  It is like they have visited the top of the mountain, God has spoken to them, or perhaps Matt Cutts, their idea of God, and they have come down to deliver these dictums of SEO that  we are supposed to take as the truth with no real basis behind it other than being driven by fear and confusion.

So in the end, while it is critical to know the score right now, how well we manage change is also a defining element in our success, and we must always look to the evidence to determine which paths to take.

Which is more important, human readers or search engine bots?  Well this one isn’t too tough.  If we don’t direct enough effort at the search engines, then we won’t really have any people reading our web pages.

Getting your keywords in on your page is absolutely crucial.

So SEO is definitely very fundamental to our success.  In fact we don’t just have to be good at SEO to be successful, we have to be very good at it.  With every search term, there are only a handful of sites, the first few in the listings, which get almost all of the traffic.  This is completely independent of whatever merit their sites may have.

So a web site may offer complete rubbish, but if their SEO is up to snuff, they will get the listings.  Whether they get the traffic or not is going to depend on how good their title and meta description is, as that is what people see when they view search results.  However, at this point we haven’t even spoken of their website content, so we can say that website content in itself, at least from a humans’ perspective, has nothing to do with search results.

Now search engines are getting better at distinguishing good content from bad, but these distinctions are and probably always will be a matter of excluding content along certain formats.  For instance the ultra spammy language that used to be successful a few years ago is now discounted instead of being rewarded.

So all of this has really nothing to do with the quality of our content, and in fact we really need to view what bots like and what people like as entirely separate matters.  Now there are different things that we need to be focusing on in terms of looking to please search engines, and they all have to do with the use of our keywords.

No Matter How Good Our Message Is, It Must Always Have A Hidden Message

We may write the ultimate piece of content, where people will read it and sit there stunned for a considerable length of time, but this isn’t the kind of thing that search engines tend to be impressed with.  We humans look at content primarily in terms of meaning, something machines can’t fathom at all.

We do need to strive for value when it comes to targeting our human readers, along with looking to hype things up to communicate and enhance this value, but that lesson is for another day.  We must first focus on the bots to ensure that our hidden message is getting through, and getting through loud and clear.

We need this as loud as possible without making it so loud that the search engines will become annoyed  with us.  Things change fast in this landscape, and just since I’ve started writing this series there has been some real changes in it, and we must always be prepared to adapt.  Adapting though means making our hidden messages as loud as we can, and this is what is called optimization.

The Four Main Elements Of Keywords

There are four main elements to keyword weighting, and that would be location, prominence, frequency, and saturation.  You could also say that the importance of each of these features are in that order, although all are important, and all merit mention.

Once you have figured out how these things all work, you will have a very good blueprint on how to design your content to accentuate what you want accentuated.   So let’s start with location.  Imagine the content on your webpage as a grid, with the most valuable location on the grid being in the upper left.

So if you are typing on that page, the first character is the most valuable, the next one the second most, and so on, all the way down the page.  So we’re looking at this as if all our characters were the same size, and if we set out to type them, each character becomes less and less important, until you type the last one, which is least valuable.

So what we want to do here, given this weighting, is to look to concentrate our keywords not only throughout the entire page, but in particular, toward the top of it.  This all starts with our main headline, which we can then accentuate by making the size bigger and adding other formats such as bolding, italicizing, and/or underlining.

All four of these formatting techniques will tend to add to the weighting that search engines place on text, and while we don’t want to overdo it here, it’s a very good idea to use these formats to set off what we tell both people and search engines about what we feel is more important text within our pages.

It All Starts At The Top

So with our headline, that’s the most important thing on our page because of location, so we don’t want to hold back here and not throw the kitchen sink at it.  This is no time to be bashful, and while we do need to operate under the constraints of what looks professional, in other words not creating shoddy looking web pages that are obviously put together with only search engines in mind and not people.

It’s not really that difficult to do though, although it is true that there is a real art involved in balancing form and function, and as you become more experienced at this, you will be able to create better and better looking web pages that also do everything you want them to do as far as SEO goes.

So we definitely want to be weighting things more toward the top, which means making more of a conscious effort to include our main keywords liberally in that area, including the headlines and the body.  However, since these main keywords are what our pages are about, this should not be too difficult.  However, this is far too important of an element to be left up to chance.

So especially if you are newer at writing content, you are well advised to make a real conscious effort to talk about what you are looking to rank for early on.  While you should be looking to reference this material throughout the body of the page, it’s particularly important that you focus on it early on.

So in the next lesson I will be speaking more on some of the concepts of good content, including looking to capture human interest as well.

Well created content captures the interest of both human readers and search engines.  Just like with our meta tags, we want to capture the attention of both.  So needless to say we aren’t going to want to embellish things too much, although at the same time we don’t want to neglect paying enough attention to crafting our headlines and content with a view toward both types of readers.

Vision is key.

While I am all for using keywords to our maximum benefit, the best way to do this these days is to strive for a completely natural form.  As it turns out, this is what the search engines are now looking for as well.  This is actually a very good development for us, as it allows us to take full advantage of quality of content while at the same time not being penalized for it.

For instance, in past days, too spammy looking content was rewarded perhaps too much, so what would end up happening is that these spammer sites would get more searches than they would perhaps deserve, at least in terms of the value that their sites would have to human readers.  So the human readers would end up getting at least somewhat disappointed, and in that sense, the search engines would have failed to provide the quality of service that they seek.

So I more than welcome updates such as Google’s Panda and now the so called Penguin update, as all of us should who embrace the quality of our content over merely looking to manipulate search engines without having to worry too much about how good our content really is.

It’s Still Always About Pushing The Limits

These changes serve to allow search engines to do a better job at what they are seeking to do, which is to at least try to provide the best content they can on a given topic.  Now this still remains a monumental task, but it’s one that over the years the search engines are getting better at.

I remember when I first started out in the poker affiliate business how angry I felt that search engine promotion was such a corrupt endeavor.  However, as a little time passed, it became obvious that the only way to succeed was to have the attitude of if you can’t beat em, join em.  So if search engine manipulation was what was needed, then I best do it, and I best become good at it.

So I looked to find out what the limits were here and I certainly did do that.  Some of the things I did went too far, and I had to take a few steps back along the way, and sometimes was even pushed to the ground, but that’s the only way to learn what the true limits were as far as our positioning our sites for best SEO effect,

So the fundamental principles haven’t changed much, even though the bar has been set higher over the years as far as what is ideal, especially lately.  So as we go along here and search engines get more and more sophisticated in their algorithms, especially Google, this does require us to adjust as we go along.

So much of the SEO advice you see out there is nothing more than guesswork, although some of it uses better guesses than others.  I do think that if the majority doesn’t think that you go too far with your SEO, it probably isn’t very well optimized, so I wouldn’t pay too much attention to those people, even some self proclaimed experts.

We All Have To See Ourselves As Students Of SEO

The real experts base their knowledge upon what works and what doesn’t in the real world, and whenever I do get the privilege to hear what these people have to say, I always listen closely.  Other than that, the din of all the other people who come up with all of these prognostications which may or may not have any merit goes on, and probably always will, but we need to be always open to learning.

Probably the biggest part of this learning process is to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff as far as SEO advice goes.  I know I’ve been harping on this a lot during this series but especially if you are new to this game, and even if you are aren’t, this is of critical importance.  If you do not heed this advice, you are setting yourself up for failure right out of the gate, as sure as the sun rises.

So my philosophy is not to look to teach as much as it is looking to get people to be willing to learn, and learn from their own experiences.  I can share mine, but ultimately you will be the one making all of the decisions here, and they need to be based upon reality and not just supposition.

So with that all being said, I couldn’t be happier that we’re now moving toward a more natural form in terms of SEO, at least a little.  There’s much more that needs to be done to cause the cream to really rise to the top, and although this happening to any great degree is probably no more than a pipe dream, I guess that we still do want to have manipulative skill factor in to a fairly large degree as well, as this keeps this a contest of skill for the most part.

So The Skills Needed Here Are More Subtle

We can’t just pump up our sites like we used to, and the bar is being set a little higher at least lately.  We want and need to be aware of this changing environment, but at the same time, we won’t ever know where the bar is set unless we look to challenge it, or at the very least, are not afraid to take our ideas and see what happens.

In a sense, as more natural forms are more rewarded, in other words using completely natural content which is perfectly designed for human readers, as I’ve said, there are still skills involved in terms of strategically positioning our keywords and such, although these skills are more subtle.

So when I speak of things like keyword stuffing in your content, this does not mean overdoing it like we used to be able to get away with, and even be rewarded more for that.  What it takes these days is more subtle skills where you look to position your content in a way that both completely and ideally satisfies both types of visitors, humans and bots.  This is definitely more ideal for us as we can now work both crowds fully.

In the last session I spoke of taking advantage of opportunities to attach keywords to graphical files on our websites that we may not think of immediately as images.  Search engines do pay attention to this stuff, people generally don’t, and we don’t care if they do.

Stuffed box of keywords.

So while just about everything requires us to take both people and bots into account, this is not the case here, and it’s just about looking to manipulate the bots.  So it’s like old time SEO in that way, and we definitely need to be looking to take advantage here.

So while we don’t really want to go crazy with these, a couple dozen or so sounds pretty good for the average web page.  If you don’t have that many graphical files, don’t worry about it, but anything that is a graphical file is fair game.

Here’s the rub here.  Bots don’t see images as we do and have no clue what the image really is.  For instance, we have a banner for Party Poker.  Should we attach the text “party poker” or anything similar to the banner?  Not unless that’s the keyword we want to rank for, and unless our website is about Party Poker Bonus or something similar, it doesn’t make any sense at all to put that in the alt text.

Alt Image Text Is Truly A Free For All

So what can we put there instead?  Well, whatever we want.  With our page we’re going to want poker strategy in there a lot, in all of them perhaps.  Isn’t that overdoing it though?  Well we do want to vary the text but that can be as simple as calling our images pokerstrategy1, pokerstrategy2, etc.  So in the bots’ eye, there’s a whole lot of poker strategy going on, with all the banners, all the images, maybe some formatting graphic files, and so on.

I would be a little careful repeating keywords though too much and my advice here  would be to also work other keywords if we’re shooting for more than one string, and we really should be doing that anyway.  So maybe I’ve got some on poker lessons, poker tips, poker bonus, whatever.

So just make sure that first of all you vary the text and not repeat it, and second make sure that your text is actually in the content as well.  Don’t have some referencing poker bonuses for instance if you don’t talk about it on the page.  That won’t hurt you but won’t help you either.

Set Yourself Up With Your Own SEO Lab

Other than that, just go to town here and while this isn’t all that powerful of a thing, it does help, and any time we can help ourselves freely like this we really should.  There are some people, a lot of people, who will tell you this and a lot of other things are considered spam by the search engines and doing what I am suggesting will negatively impact your on page SEO score.

I’m not seeing that at all and these people are just going by what Google has said, most of which is just a matter of trying to dissuade people from optimizing.  However, I do realize that things can change and definitely do at times, and people may read this stuff years later.

So what you really want to do, at the point where you’re ranking for something, even your own site, is to test this and other things out.  Remove some of the alt image tags.  See what happens.  Add them back and add some more this time, and so on.  You will learn through experimentation what works and what doesn’t, and this is actually by far the most important lesson I can teach you.

The Comment Tag

I’ve used these and honestly haven’t seen any measurable effect with them, even the ones that are so stuffed with keywords that they are dripping with them, and are only something that a spammer’s mother would be proud of.  So I don’t use them, although some people think that it might help with some search engines, although Google isn’t one of them for sure.

So if you want to use these then go ahead, it’s one of those things that really can’t hurt and since humans won’t be reading them you can do whatever you want with them, although it’s probably good to use real English and not go too far with them on the spam side of things.

Headlines, Read All About It

So we’ve spoken about the so called meta tags, meaning things that aren’t visible on our web pages themselves,  so it’s finally time to start talking about using on page SEO on the web site content itself.

This all starts with the headline, or I should say headlines, since there should be several of them.  How many headlines is too many?  Well as far as the bots go, you can’t have too many, although we do need to put some content in between them for the sake of our readers.

That’s an important enough of a consideration to stick to what seems natural and professional.  The best approach here is to look to construct your headlines naturally according to the topic that the segment addresses while focusing on getting your keywords in there as prominently as you can.  So there’s no real secrets here although your effective use of headlines are going to depend on your effective use of keywords in the text itself.

Your best value here is to make sure that you focus on your main keywords in your headlines as this will create a synergistic effect, where the meta tags will support your headlined keywords and vice versa.  Whatever is used in your meta tags needs to be confirmed and supported in the content, and if what you are using in the content is supported by the meta tags, this will definitely accentuate them.

However, there will be keywords that will emerge in your content, including your headlines, that won’t be in your meta tags, which may produce search results for you.  A lot of searches with less popular searches will just emerge naturally from your content.  Since you don’t really have to consciously focus on this, this can be a bonus, but if you are skilled enough to accentuate this by design, this all becomes more effective.

The effective use of headlines though requires a good understanding of how search engines weigh keywords, which involves things like frequency, saturation, location, and format.  Understanding this is the keystone to good on page SEO in fact.  We’ve spoken a bit about this already but I’ll pick that up in the next session.

Like the page title, we want to focus on both selling our site to convince people to click on it, and also to tell the search engines that we mean business. However, while the emphasis was on our keywords with the title page, with our selling being a side consideration of sorts, with the meta description we need to focus more on the human beings.

Pollinating Our Web Pages

Our page descriptions are in fact our primary sales pitch to the people who read them. Of course we need to make it to the point where someone will actually read them in the first place, so we definitely can’t lose sight of needing to get our keywords in there as well.

Once again though, early on in text is given more weight, so we want to get them in early. There’s also more room to work with in creating our meta descriptions, as we now have about 160 characters to work with, a hundred more than with our title. Once again, we want to take best advantage of the space allotted to us.

There are some people who say that Google doesn’t pay attention to the meta description anymore but there’s no real reason to believe this. It doesn’t really matter if they do or not though as this is for the humans for the most part anyway, and we’re looking to talk them into visiting our site.

So let’s look to come up with a good one with our example site. When I’m doing this I’m keeping some other terms in mind that people might be interested in as well as giving us some props for the keywords involved.

So I both want to reinforce what is in our title as well as throw in some extras. So here it is: “Learn the secrets of poker strategy from a pro. Bring your poker game to the next level without paying a cent with our winning poker lessons and poker tips.”

So that‘s within the allotted range, talks up the site, and gets our main keywords in there as well as some alternate ones. So of course this is just an example but it shows how you want to look to spice things up for the readers while at the same time looking to work the search engines as well.

As you get better at this, this will come more naturally to you, and you will eventually get to the point where this and other aspects of on page SEO will come fairly naturally to you.

Don’t Just Focus On The Home Page Here

It wasn’t all that long ago when it didn’t really make a whole lot of sense for sites which didn’t have a lot of authority built up to focus much effort at all on the inner pages. You had to spend your external or off page SEO on something, and other people were spending it all on their home pages, so you had to do the same, at least until your home page got ranked well.

Not long ago though this really changed and even inner pages with no real effort at on page SEO now rank for terms. So while you still may not want to spend your off page SEO on these inner pages, you definitely want to spend the time setting them up properly as far as on page SEO goes.

So all of the principles that I am going over here apply to all pages, although it is true that your home page still is your number one. If you do all of this right the first time, you won’t have to go back and fix things later when you discover that you could use a little help with these pages generating more searches and traffic.

The Keyword Meta Tag And Alt Image Text

While it is clear that Google no longer uses meta keyword tags, and hasn’t used them in a long time, it is said that some other search engines do, so it certainly doesn’t do you any harm to fill this tag up with relevant keywords. Don’t overuse this tag though, a dozen or so of your main keywords is fine, and make sure that they are in the content of the page.

Other than that, there’s not a lot to say about this tag, and this should be the simplest thing that you do when you set up your on page SEO. So I wouldn’t spend too much time thinking about this, and just go with what you are talking about in your content.

Alt image text is the text that comes up when you mouse over an image on a webpage. This might seem pretty straightforward, as there will be a few images on your page and you just load them up with what the image is about. This way people who can’t view the image for whatever reason can see what it is about.

Optimizing The Use Of Alt Image Text

That’s the way Google would like you to use alt image text, but listening to Google isn’t always the right way to go, and very often isn’t in fact. We are out to exploit them, not placate them, and taking advantage of the opportunities of alt image text is a real good example of this.

The first thing that we need to realize is what these images actually consist of. The way bots see our page, there is two different types of content, one of them text and the other a graphical file. So we want to hit up all the graphical files we can, and some of these opportunities aren’t as obvious to some people.

Like, for instance, a line on the bottom of the page. It’s a thin line, separating the main text from the header, so this isn’t an image, right? Of course it is, and we can load up some alt image text there too. Anything that isn’t text can have an alt image. If you build your own sites as I do then this gives you a huge amount of alt image opportunities.

Can you overdo this in terms of the sheer number of these on a web page? Well unlike some people I don’t just talk out of my hat and I’ve actually used a ton of them on pages, dozens upon dozens on a single page, just to see what the limits are, and the more I added, the more Google liked the page.

Now I’m not suggesting you go this far, but you definitely should consider adding some extra ones. So in the next session I’ll pick up the discussion of the use of alt image text, as well as get into other aspects of on page SEO. See you then.

Putting Our Plan Into Action

So we know what we need to develop, our on page SEO plan, and I’ve taken a lot of time discussing the foundations of a good on page SEO strategy, so now it’s time to look to deliver the goods.  We aren’t afraid to swing the bat like so many webmasters out there, and we are in fact looking to optimize rather than just running scared.

That’s what optimization is, pushing the edges, until you reach a point of diminishing return and then you cut back to get to the ideal spot.  So this is what we will be doing with the pages on our website.

Now we won’t just be working with our main keywords, as there will be opportunities to look to optimize with some others as well, and it doesn’t hurt to get these other ones in there whenever we can.  The main ones will be our main focus though and we’ll always look to get those in first.

So as an example we’re going to use poker strategy as our main keyword string that we’re looking to go after.  This is way too ambitious for a new site to go after as it is pretty competitive and way out of reach for you until you build a site which is of some considerable renown, but it will serve our purposes for these examples, and also is one which I’m pretty familiar with, having worked that circus for many years.

More On Keywords In URLs

I’ve spoken about getting your keywords in your page url’s, and our domain name is kenspokerstrategy.com, so it’s in there.  If it isn’t, that’s fine, but it’s better in there than not.  Once again this is overrated although you should definitely get part of it in there, as in at least the term poker.  We’ve picked ours though, and like you, we’re just going to go for it.

So since I am shooting for poker strategy in my site, and obviously I am going to actually have some poker strategy on the site, many pages of it in fact, it only makes sense to have that in the page url’s.  So this is pretty basic, but we need to make sure we are focusing on that with every page.

So in this case we will have all of our urls dealing with poker strategy as /poker strategy…, and looking to add on to this whatever topic the page deals with.  So in other words, poker strategy is the main topic, and then we put the sub topic in the url as well.

So for instance it could look like /pokerstrategy1gettingstarted, /pokerstrategy2bankroll, etc.  These other sub topics will be what the page is dealing with, and therefore will have related keywords in the article, so having it in the url and in other key places will reinforce these sub keywords and make it more likely that we will get related searches with them.  Of course we’re always reinforcing our main keywords, which is why we want poker strategy in all of them.

If we are dealing with other topics, and of course we will be since we do want to do some selling here at some point, then we will change the urls accordingly.  So for instance we will have things like /pokerroomreview1partypoker, pokerroomreview2titanpoker, etc.  So once again we are reinforcing the main topic, poker room reviews, and also getting the specific topic for the page in there as well.

It Pays To Work Both Sides Of The Aisle

So this kind of format is not only search engine friendly, it is user friendly as well.  There was a time a few years ago where it was more important to set up your site to please the search engines, using tactics that most people today would consider things to be pretty spammy indeed.  However, back then the people you were competing with were doing that, and search engines rewarded this stuff a lot more than they do now.

Nowadays, you can accomplish the same thing without using obvious stuffed to the gills content.  It’s not that you are punished with using tactics like this, as most people think, it’s that you aren’t rewarded for it like you used to, so you end up giving up too much in terms of the authority that you need to establish by using less than professional formats.

So when we look to our title and description we want to keep this concept well in mind.  While search engines put a great deal of weight on our use of keywords in this critical area, at the same time this is what people see when they view our search results, so if we want them to click on our site, we better make this enticing.

Fortunately you can do both, as our main keywords will naturally be in there when we describe why people should check out our site.  We can’t leave this to mere accident though and need to pay very close attention in fact to both of these key elements.

Our Title Needs To Really Speak Out For Us

So let’s start with the title of our pages.  We are limited to a little over 60 characters, including spaces, although if we go over this then Google will jut add ellipses and not count the part that is over.  So given that people won’t see this anyway, this is a waste.  However, what you do want to do is use at least almost all of it, especially since we can add some extra keywords in there to not only help our rankings with these other keywords, but to also entice people to our site by our showing them more of what we have to offer them.

So once again, we want to focus on our keywords earlier rather than later.  We do need to sell it at the same time though so our efforts need to be a combination of the two.  So for instance we could start out with Free Poker Strategy which not only gives us our main keywords poker strategy, but adding in the word free there both makes our offer more enticing, but also allows us to rank for free poker strategy as well.

So we have the backbone of our title, and the question now becomes whether we want to add to the sales opportunity here or add some more keywords in here.  We can do either one, but have our meta description to use for that, so I like pumping in some alternate keywords in here.

So we could go with something like Free Poker Strategy From A Pro, Expert Poker Room Reviews.  So that’s within our character allotment, and actually accomplishes both goals of spicing up the title and getting some more keywords in there, which serves to both attract some more interest and set us up for another keyword combination.  Of course this is just an example but you can see what the strategy is here.

So in the next segment we’ll move on to crafting our meta description and beyond.

The New Landscape Of SEO

It used to be much more of a battle of home pages when it came to attracting traffic, where most of your search engine traffic came to that page, with sub pages being given a lot less weighting.  So the sub pages were less competitive due to their being much more focus on the authority, or off page SEO, of a web page.

This all changed not that long ago, where for the first time really, search engines looked at websites more like we do, as websites, and not as much as collections of individual pages.  This has been a very welcome improvement for those who focus on quality content.

It used to be that even though your home page didn’t deal with a specific topic, and it was dealt with elsewhere on the site, you’d have to look to attract people looking for this information to your home page first, and then direct them to the sub pages where the information they wanted was at.

The reason was that sub pages couldn’t really compete against even vastly inferior home pages of other sites since the practice was to direct most of a site’s incoming links to their home pages, out of necessity actually.

Now though, search engines look at on page SEO a lot more, and one of the things they really look at is urls.  So for instance if you have kenspoker.com and have all of your authority pointed there, and have another page called kenspoker.com/pokerlessons, chances are that the latter page may rank higher for poker lessons, even though you may have optimized both pages for this search term.

So You Really Need To Focus On SEO With All Of Your Web Pages

The need to optimize all of your web pages may seem pretty basic and straightforward to new affiliates, as it only makes sense, but those who have been around for awhile will be used to focusing a lot more effort on the home page.  The tendency has been to really tweak the home page since this is the page that you take to the game so to speak, but that is no more.

You have to start with the content though and then tweak things from there, so that comes first and the optimization comes later, especially if you are newer and haven’t developed a flair for writing good content that is also fairly good SEO wise.  For instance you may be using indirect language a lot, meaning, it, they, and so on, where you really should be using the terms themselves.

So for instance in the following statement, “players have found that learning more about the game helps them improve their results,” we would want to look to change this to “players have found that mastering poker strategy helps them improve their results” if poker strategy is the term we’re looking to rank for.

The Better You Become At On Page SEO Writing, The Easier It Gets

So what we’re after here is content that is both fairly natural and incorporates our objectives, and the easier we can do this naturally, the easier SEO will be for us.  It’s really a question of getting in as much as we can without having our content seem to spammy to human readers.  Contrary to what a lot of people think, the standards of search engines are much lower, and you can get away with some pretty awkward writing, and maybe even help yourself here on that end of things, but we want to at the same time convey an air of professionalism and authority, which too spammy styles don’t accomplish very well.

So the better you get at this, the easier it will be to provide quality content both in terms of the content and the optimization of it, liberally sprinkling your writing with the terms and keyword strings you wish to accentuate while at the same time making your writing as engaging to readers as you can make it.

Even with this in place, it still pays to go back over your work and look to edit for keyword optimization, perhaps adding in some extra ones while not taking away from the quality of the writing too much.

The Focus For Many Has Been One Of Avoidance

While there are certainly techniques that truly involve excessive keyword stuffing, if you apply reasonable standards of readability, you won’t even come close to this.  Although Google has announced that they are going to be going after excessive use of keywords, what people don’t understand is that the bar right now is set so far out of sight that they can lower it a lot and still have it so high that all but the spammiest writing won’t even come close to it.

One of the things that can really open your eyes to how high the bar is really set is to add very keyword dense footer links to your internal pages.  You can do some absolutely crazy things with this stuff and not only get ranked down, but get ranked up pretty well.  So for instance if you are looking to rank for poker strategy, you could have footer links at the bottom such as “Poker Strategy:  (Topic 1), Poker Strategy (Topic 2)” and so on.

If there’s a term that you currently rank for, give this a try, and you may be pleasantly surprised with the results.  I’ve done this with sites with dozens of pages, and people can’t believe how anyone would even consider something that looks so blatantly spammy.  However, I put it in there, my rankings for this keyword go up, and if I take it away, I go back down.

Now you don’t have to use such a technique if you don’t want to, but the point is that you could.  If some day things change here and your rankings go down from such a strategy, then you just get rid of it.  Play around with it though, and if you find that you ever end up going too far, don’t just ditch the thing, adjust down until you find the optimal point.  Adjusting like this is the essence of on page SEO actually.

You always should be looking to optimize, meaning getting the ideal amount of your keywords in there while still maintaining the high quality presentations that your human readers require and demand.

So as we continue to progress in our discussion of on page SEO, we need to keep in mind that the goal here is one of optimization, which will require us to look to find what the ideal level is as far as how we implement our keywords into our pages.  The spoils go to the bold here, and we need to have the resolve to at least be willing to help ourselves and not be afraid to look to achieve the leg up on our competition that we need in order to obtain the best results we can.

Keywords Aren’t Called Keywords For Nothing

In the last session, I pointed out the key determiner of on page SEO, which is the extent and location of your target keywords.  Your entire site needs to be built around the keywords you are looking to target, which includes everything from your URL to your page titles and descriptions to the topics you’ll be presenting.

We’ve already spoken about selecting the right keywords in past sessions, and at this point you should have spent whatever time needed to select the proper ones.  It’s now time to plug all of this in, so we certainly do need to be sure of ourselves at this point.

There is no turning back now.  We are about to build our stage and our stage needs to be selling what we are looking to sell.  So that needs to be decided at this point.  So now it’s time to dig out our keywords and put our plan into action.

Sub Page URLs

So once again, it’s all about making sure that we are showcasing what we want to showcase.  So we spoke about keywords in our domain name, but that’s been settled as well.  However, with our sub pages, we definitely want to get our keywords in there.  This is a simple matter though, as we simply will be selecting whatever we want with those, as in kenspokerstrategy.com/pokerstrategy.

You can use dashes in there if you want to set out the keywords, although this would be for the benefit of readers only as search engine bots don’t need spaces to differentiate between words.

Your best bet here isn’t to try to cook these up just to get keywords in there, as we’ll be doing plenty of that later, but with the sub page URLs we do want to match the page title with the topic.  If the topic doesn’t fit into any of your main keywords, then that’s fine.  You in fact will be in a position to hit on a lot of other, much smaller keyword string searches with your sub pages, and you want to let this all happen naturally.

A Note On The Risks Of “Spamming”

I read things all the time that you want to be careful, even very careful, that you don’t overdo the optimization in SEO.  I’ve said it before, I’m saying it again now, and I’ll probably say it again, this is pure nonsense.  Now this isn’t to say that it’s not possible to overdo things, although I’ve yet to run into this using natural language.

If you are a spammer, then you might run into this problem, but the bar is set so high, at least at present, that you’d probably have to go pretty far overboard to be targeted as overusing keywords.  Things do change though, and at some point the bar might be lowered, meaning that it may be optimal to cut down on the use and frequency of keywords.

However, if and when that happens, this just means that you’ll have to adjust to re-optimize.  So your rankings go down a little because you now are overusing keywords.  So you cut down a bit and then you get things optimized again.  Most website owners live in such fear of being seen as spammers that they don’t have the courage to even venture anywhere near what is optimal.  That’s fine, let them think that, as we can gain some real advantages from not being so paranoid.

Optimal SEO Means That You Need To Do Some Stuffing

The worst thing that could possibly happen from overusing keywords or using other basic optimization techniques is that it will negatively affect your rankings, causing you to have to adjust to bring things more in line with what the optimal amount would be.  They don’t throw your site in the dungeon or any other such nonsense.  There are indeed some things that can get you in serious trouble but just looking to optimize isn’t one of them, and far from it in fact.
So while you may hear lots of people crowing about wanting to avoid “keyword stuffing,” it is this stuffing that is a big part of what on page SEO is all about.  SEO in itself is using techniques to best manipulate search engine rankings.  The very fact that we are paying attention to this means we are looking to set things up to take advantage of how search engines rank sites.

Optimization Means Optimization

If we instead look to take a more “natural” approach, a perfectly natural approach would mean that we aren’t paying attention to SEO at all, which is the worst thing you can do.  If we look to be semi natural so to speak, then we’re only going to look to partly  optimize.  If we want to optimize though, then we need to optimize.

If you ask all these Chicken Littles what their fears are based upon here when it comes to keyword stuffing and other similar optimization techniques, you will find that it is based purely upon paranoia and not upon science.  We need science though if we want to even try to optimize.  So you stuff away and if it ever turns out that you are overdoing it, you will know, and you will also know what the optimal level is, which is a bit less than what you were presently doing.

So we’re always looking to find out what the optimal is, the ideal, to get the maximum effect out of our optimization techniques.  It might seem that I’m harping on way too much about this, but it’s only because the world of SEO is so rife with this distorted thinking and I do not want you to fall prey to it.

You Do Need To be Able To Tell What’s Going On Though

If you are going to be able to make good decisions here, you do need to keep tabs on things, meaning tracking the effect that your SEO changes have on your rankings for various keywords.  Initially, this can be more challenging, as you probably won’t be ranking for anything but your site name in the early stages.

There’s also a lot of factors that go into manipulating search engine rankings, and on page SEO is just one side of the coin.  You’ll also be looking to work the off page SEO side of things.  While we may not want to look to push the envelope so to speak too much until we have a means to better measure the effect of our efforts, merely looking to stay within the boundaries of what looks fairly natural is one of the things we want to be doing anyway, and this will keep you well within reasonable limits.

On Page SEO Is The Icing For Your Cake

If we think of your content as being your cake, then effective on page SEO would be the icing on it.  If we don’t have any icing at all, then our cake is going to both look bland to search engines, and taste bland to our potential visitors.  Through a combination of the two, they won’t even probably get to see it, and if they did, they probably wouldn’t want to eat it anyway.

This is especially true given that there are probably a lot more exciting looking cakes out there which people will want to eat instead.  So if we do apply icing to it and it is put on in a sloppy manner, that won’t work too well either.  What we really need to do is to make our cake look as good as we can, and then and only then will it be ready to put out there in the market.

There are several main factors to the design and application of our icing, including such things as our urls, our page title, our description, our headlines, our keyword distribution, and our site organization including our internal link structure.  There’s a lot to talk about here, so let’s get started.

This Discussion Is Really All About Keywords

Instead of calling it on page SEO, we could pretty much call it keyword SEO and be pretty accurate.  On page SEO is really all about the optimization of our keywords, which are what we are looking to rank with.

In spite of what some people may think, search engines still and really always will live in a world of quantization.  What I mean here is that whatever means that they use to rank websites, it will always be a matter of how much and where.

Search Engines Can’t Really Determine Quality

For the most part, humans see things in a qualitative fashion, which calls upon abilities that we can’t really just give to machines.  For instance, a website may have a beautiful or professional looking home page, or it may provide advice that is appreciated by the reader far beyond what we can quantify.

Machines really can’t appreciate this, or they may not be programmed to make the more subtle distinctions that are needed to qualify things properly.  For instance, I could provide some great poker advice in an article, and people who know about poker will see that it is valuable, but the computers that run the search engines know nothing about poker, and I may as well be telling people to never fold, as the machine wouldn’t know the difference.

So search engines do not know how to play poker like we do, and even if they designed a poker playing program, you can’t really quantify poker advice like you can game actions, so their being able to make any kind of distinctions at all between good and bad are way beyond what is even possible.

Now in theory they could hire a team of poker experts to manually read and rate every site dealing with poker strategy, and another team who are experts in poker room reviews, and so on, but they would also have to do this for every other topic out there on the internet.  They are a business out to make money, and this is so out there as far as what would be cost effective for them that it’s absolutely absurd to think that this would even be able to take place even on a small scale.

So It Really Comes Down To Keyword Positioning And Frequency

So what we are left with is various methods of quantification.  So instead of being able to appreciate a good poker strategy article, they will look for the terms poker and strategy and their also occurring in combination, in addition to some other related keywords.

So this all comes down to where and how often, and there are some basic principles to this which I am going to share with you that will provide you with a solid foundation to build your on page SEO with.

So these two keys can be summed up by the two words early and often.  There’s also a third concept, which is prominence, which means that certain positions and styles get awarded a higher weighting than others, for instance larger and bolded text counts for more than that in a regular font, since it’s assumed that this other text indicates more importance, which it usually does.

Keywords In Your URLs

If you remember back when I was discussing the importance of choosing a good domain name, I spoke about your at least including keywords in them.  We spoke about balancing this with looking to brand our sites and I suggested a method where we can do both at the same time.

Once you’ve chosen your domain name, it’s done for good, so if you’ve done so already then this will only pertain to future domains that you choose, but there is an important lesson about positioning that comes up with keywords in your domain.

Now as I say that I do need to point out that Google has made a big change in how they weigh positioning in URLs, and we can guess that they wanted to make things more open and not excessively award sites who got in the game early enough to get the so called choice domains.

It’s not even that important anymore to have your keywords in your domain, but let me look to explain all of this first from the way things were, and still are to a lesser extent.

The New URL Landscape

Google and other search engines have always weighed keywords according to how close they were to the beginning of something.  With regard to a lot of other things, this still is a big factor.  With keywords, it’s far less a factor than it used to be.

So for instance if someone had the domain name pokerstrategy.com, then the keywords are exactly at the front, and this was considered a significant factor.  Something like poker-strategy.com would be given a lesser weighting since the second keyword is one character more to the right.

If I then used kenspokerstrategy.com, then both keywords would be four characters to the right in comparison with the original pokerstrategy.com.  Now a great many webmasters saw this weighting as being way more significant than in reality and would pay large sums of money to avoid a few characters off, which was pretty crazy by the way, but that’s now been given less weighting than it used to be, and we can almost say that a few characters are pretty much a non issue, although we should still look to take this into account.

So I’ll continue the discussion of optimizing URLs in the next session.

Your Content Is The Stage, On Page SEO Is The Director

Just like a play won’t come off very well without good direction, your affiliate website also needs to be organized properly so that the presentation is effective as possible.  While this is called on page SEO, meaning internal SEO, it’s not just about the search engines, as effective titles, headlines, descriptions, and so forth are also very important to look to optimize the effect on your human visitors as well.

I’ve spoken a little about some of these elements in past articles, and what I want to do now is address all of the major elements in constructing your site so that it not only looks good to visitors, it looks good to the search engines as well, and in particular, it conveys the message that you want it to.

In a way, well written content will be to a large degree already pretty optimized, as it will be well constructed along the lines of the topic that you are writing about, will have effective titles and headlines, will have your topic words or keywords reasonably well sprinkled throughout, and so on.

However, what we are after here isn’t just good construction, as we need to make a conscious effort to tweak things to the degree that we are truly putting our best foot forward to best satisfy the needs of both search engines and people.

We Really Need To Focus On Both Search Engines And People

A lot of affiliates and other webmasters seem to think that pleasing search engines and visitors are two separate goals, and either then set out to please one or the other or perhaps look to strike a balance between the two.  Back In the earlier days, this used to be a lot more true, as you could get away with some pretty crazy stuff, and even more importantly, you used to see other sites do this a lot more, which you’d have to compete with.

So now, the trend has been away from the keyword crazy stuff that looks terrible to readers but used to get you an edge with the search engines.  The reason for this change has been due to a small degree from changes in search engines’ algorithms, with things like its ability to detect what is considered unnatural language more.

The biggest driver of this change though has been what we could call the effect of the roar, where search engines capitalize on people’s fears of being discredited for this or that practice and will adjust, and often over adjust, to changes that they expect.

We Also Need To Separate The Wheat From The Chaff

It doesn’t really matter though what brings about these changes, as the effect is the same.  It’s always been the case though that Google and other search engines do not have to go to great lengths to promote the changes they desire, as they very often just have to threaten to do something, or warn people against something, and that in itself can do the trick.

So while for instance Google has always cautioned against the use of “excessive” things in SEO, what defines excessive is a matter of interpretation.  However, we can get a much better idea of their definition by having the courage to test things, something that most webmasters are afraid to do by the way.

You can bet though that the experts aren’t so easily put off, the true experts that is, not just some people who claim to be and put out all sorts of advice of varying degrees of quality on their websites, sometimes for free, sometimes for a fee.  The people really in the know aren’t really this prone to sharing, and sometimes you can get a glimpse of their thinking if you are lucky, but for the most part we’re going to eventually have to be willing to learn and experiment if we really want to be in the know.

SEO Is All About Competing With Other Sites

A very valuable tool when looking to learn both on page SEO, the internal search engine optimization dynamics, and off page SEO, the external dynamics, is to look to see what our successful competitors are doing.  Of the two, doing this with on page SEO is definitely the easiest, and is something that even newer affiliates can look to do.

You can and should be looking at both successful sites in your niche, the ones that you are looking to directly compete with, and successful sites in general in the world of poker.  You will probably learn more from the sites which are successful on a much larger scale than your competitors, as these sites will tend to have their act together a lot more.

As a general rule of thumb, if a much better site in terms of SEO is doing something, then you should also consider doing it.  By looking at many of these sites, we can then come up with some real insights into what may be influencing their results.  Now a lot of this is driven by external factors, their so called authority, but as far as internal factors, we can take what they are doing and look to emulate their common practices with a fairly high degree of confidence.

In essence, what we’ll be looking to do is to beat our competitors at SEO, both on and off page, but it all starts with on page.  We aren’t really interested in sites that don’t rank well, we instead need to be looking at top ranking sites on the first page of what we are trying to rank for.  Then, after we look at those, we then compare what they are doing to what much bigger sites are doing with on page SEO.  Then we look to compete better with the sites in our niche.

So in other words what we want to do here is go out and learn what we can from the bigger boys, and then use these tools and ideas to beat the smaller ones that we are looking to go up against.  So a fair bit of time will be spent learning, but in the end it is he or she who has learned the most that will be coming out on top and making the most money, so it’s hard to overstate the importance of this education.

In the next session I will be continuing on with this discussion and also will be providing you with some tips on how you can measure your progress in looking to optimize your sites.