Here is a quick tutorial on how to optimize a web page for the search engines.

1. Find Keywords:

Pick a list of words relevant to your business.  Look for keywords on your website, your competitors’ sites, ask current customers, vendors, friends, and relatives what words or phrases they associate with your business.  Go to Google and type the keywords and key phrases in the the browser.  Google will return a list of related searches (found at the bottom of the 1st page of listings).

Add all of these keywords to a list and create a web page for each keyword phrase you are targeting.

2. Put the Keywords in Your Page’s URL:

Google and other search engines use the text of the url of the page to determine the page’s content.  Placing the keywords in the url (ex: aspireid.com/ways-to-optimize-a-web-page) will help optimize the page for your intended keywords.

2. Put the Keyword / Keyword Phrase in the Page’s Title Tags:

Well-constructed title tags contain the main keyword or keyword phrase for the page, followed by a brief description of the page’s content. The title tag should be less than 65 characters and avoid using stop words such as: a, if, the, then, and, an, to, etc. Your title tag should also be limited to the use of alphanumeric characters, hyphens, and commas.

4. Put Keywords in the Page’s Meta Tags:

The next step is to add keyword and description tags to the page.  These tags contains information about the page’s content and help search engines index the information.  The description is what appears in search results and helps to persuade search engine users to visit your web site.

The description tag should be between 25 and 35 words in length.

Your keywords meta tag should contain between 1-3 keywords or keyword phrases that are also found in the page’s content.

5. Keywords Should be Placed in the Heading Tags:

Your page should include your keywords in the H1 heading tag.

6. Use Keywords in the Page Content:

Pages should have between 300 and 700 words of descriptive content that contain the keywords specified in the keywords meta tag for the page. These keywords should appear in the first paragraph on the page, and also be those that occur most frequently on the page. The keyword density for a web page should be approximately 4%.  So, for every 100 words, the main keyword for the page would be mentioned 4 times.

7. Monitor Your Rank:

Give the search engines a few days, then check to see how the page is ranking with its intended keywords.