You just learned the importance of including your target keyword or phrase in your header tags and title tags. Those are just a few of the important search engine considerations you should be making when creating content online, apart from keyword placement. While including keywords and related phrases is definitely needed to tell search engines what your content is about, the same is true for other factors.

Effective search engine optimization means including clues in your coding and website design to keep the search engines happy as well. The 12 search engine ranking factors discussed in your last module will help boost your rank for target keywords and phrases. The following considerations will also help.

Write for Human Beings First

You should always create content by first considering the human factor. Catering to technical SEO factors is definitely important to improve the success of your online efforts. However, you should, in every case, write for human beings first and search engines second.

Now that you know the importance of keywords for search engine ranking and traffic, that last statement may confuse you. You may be thinking, “Shouldn’t I be sure to include keywords and related words and phrases in my content?” You definitely should, but the best way to do that to make both people and search engines happy is to just go ahead and get your message down.

Write your blog posts, articles, press releases, or other content with no concern for the search engines. Create content that solves a big problem in your marketplace. What are the things that keep your target audience up at night? What problems, concerns, and questions does your perfect prospect have? Make content that answers those questions and provides value to your readers.

Google, Bing, and the other major search engines constantly talk about quality content being the most important component of their search engine algorithms. Take the time to make a great piece of content, thinking about the human emotions involved regarding your target keyword or phrase. After you have done that, you can edit your content to ensure you have other important ranking factors covered.

Use HTML

Odds are your website or blog has been coded in HTML. This is the preferred code for search engines. If you choose one of the popular blogging or website platforms like WordPress as the basis for your web property, everything you create will be defaulted to HTML.

In some rare cases some code other than HTML may be used. This could happen if you hire someone else to build your website. Communicate with your web designer, letting them know that your site needs to be created in HTML. That is what the search engines prefer, so it just makes sense to use this particular code.

Link structure

The World Wide Web is not named the World Wide Filing Cabinet for a reason. The way all of the information on the internet is connected resembles a spider’s web more than a traditional linear filing system. On a spider’s web a single strand of silk takes you to an intersection of 2, 3, or more strands. Each one of those strands offers multiple options as well.

On the internet, the strands that connect web pages are called links. The importance of internal and external backlinks was mentioned earlier. Just as important as relevancy is to your links, having the proper structure will also help your SEO efforts.

The proper internal link structure for your website begins with your homepage. That important page should link to relevant pages on your site. Each one of those pages should then link to other pages on your site that deal with the same topic or information, or a related keyword or phrase. It should be easy for search engines to trace every page on your website back to your homepage.

This makes it much easier for indexing. Consider that you have 1 homepage and 4 other pages on your website, pages A, B, C, and D. Your homepage links to pages A and B. Pages C and D are not linked to your homepage, or to pages A and B. This can lead to those pages being “orphaned” by the search engines, which means they are absolutely invisible and not accessible to web surfers.

Make sure that every page of your website or blog is linked to another page on that site, and that they are eventually linked back to your homepage. This is extremely important for quality assessment and better keyword ranking.

Not all External Links are Equal

In the Wild West days of the internet ranking for a particular keyword was easy, as far as backlinking was concerned. If you had more backlinks headed to your site than your competitor, you ranked better. The relevancy of those links did not matter. Your site might have been all about peanut butter and jelly, and you might have established a high number of backlinks from websites about orangutans, seedless oranges, and other irrelevant content.

As long as your incoming links outnumbered your competitor, where those links came from was of no concern to the search engines. That is no longer the case. You can establish just a few inbound and outbound links and outperform a web page targeted for the same keyword, even if that competitor has hundreds of more links than you. This is possible as long as the relevancy of your incoming and outgoing links pertains to your target keyword or phrase better than the competing site.

Develop relationships with authority sites that make sense to your niche or market. Offer to write guest blog posts for them, pointing back to your site. Add links to a few authority sites on your site or blog. When posting to social media, write updates, tweets, and other content that are filled with relevant keywords and phrases, and then link back to your site. Keyword and topic relevancy is extremely important when building your link structure.

Other Design Considerations:

Alt Tags – Every image you post to your site includes “alt tag” coding. That alt tag is an attribute of your image coding that gives a text alternative, explaining what the image is about. In case an image cannot be displayed for whatever reason, the alt tag description is shown instead. This used to be an important part of the Google ranking algorithm, but is not as significant anymore. Even so, you should include a description in your image alt tag to let search engines know exactly what that image is all about.

Meta Tags – These are small “snippets” of text. If you do not manually set your meta tag, a random group of text is taken from your web page. Your meta tag is what appears in search engine results, and you can decide whatever you want a page’s meta-tag to be by including it in your HTML code. They help tell search engines what your page is about, and also make it clear to web surfers what you have to offer when your content shows up in search engine results.

Site Maps – Site maps are devices that help search engines index every page of your site. Most popular blogging and website platforms, like WordPress, have multiple site map plugins that do all of the work for you. Simply add the plugin to your site or blog, follow the directions, and your site map is updated regularly.

Exact Match Domain Names – In the past, owning an exact match domain name (EMD) was an important part of SEO. This means that if you had a website dedicated to silver belt buckles, you wanted your domain name to be SilverBeltBuckle.com, SilverBeltBuckle.org, or SilverBeltBuckle.net. When your domain name was an exact match for the main keyword of your website, it helped your ranking for that word.

This is not as important anymore, according to Google. However, it is another simple way to tell the search engines exactly what your site is about, and is user-friendly for web surfers as well.