Now, we're actually going to begin the optimization of our web page. This is a systematic, step by step approach, so you should be able to take this approach and apply it to any web site at all and not just the one we're doing in this example.
Page Title Tag
The first thing you need to do is select a page title for your site. The title should ONLY include your keyword phrase that you want optimized. So, if we're putting together a web site for “weight loss spells” that's going to be our title, PERIOD. Not “Great Weight Loss Spells” or “Amazing Weight Loss Spells” but just “Weight Loss Spells.” If we want to call it “Great Weight Loss Spells” then we have to go back and start the process all over again, starting with Wordtracker, finding the number of searches and then going to Google and finding the number of competing sites, as well as what the top sites are. Every keyword MUST be optimized separately. Sounds like a lot of work? Nobody said SEO was easy.
Now, having said that, if you were to do something like this for the title…
“Weight Loss Spells - Safe Weight Loss”
That would be acceptable. Not perfect, but acceptable. You won't get as much weight from Google if you just used “Weight Loss Spells” but because the main keyword phrase is in the title, you will get some weight for it. In other words the fewer the words the better.
Header h1 Tag
The next thing we want to do is create the heading for our page. This is going to be the first thing they see and unless it is a graphic header, you want the header of your page to be in a <h1> tag. Leaving this out can be hazardous to your health. In the <h1> tag is going to be the actual heading for your page, which should be “Weight Loss Spells” and that's it, unless of course you want to go with the alternate title that we mentioned above.
Because of the way that Google reads web pages when they send their Googlebots around, you want your <h1> tag to be as far to the left of the page as possible. Why? Because Googlebots read from left to right. Having the <h1> tag too far right will hurt your SE rankings.
The HTML code for you header will look like this…
<h1>Weight Loss Spells</h1>
In our next article SEO Optimizing with Sub-Headers, we'll continue with sub header tags like the <h2> tag. We'll also show you how to make Google read your keywords first. Like I said, this is some pretty complex stuff and there's a lot to go over. That's why we're breaking this tutorial up into sections. Otherwise you would definitely suffer from information overload.