There are two major factors that will help your website rank well with search engines, on-site and off-site.  On-Site factors are developed in the content and programing within your site.  Off-Site factors are processes that are done on other websites that relate to yours.  Let's take a look at these two factors in more detail.  Also, it should be clear that websites are not optimized, PAGES are optimized separately.  Although we may make reference to optimizing your website, we are always referring to optimizing a Page on your site.  Each page will be optimized for different keywords based on the content of each page.

On-Site SEO will include things such as content, description meta tags, page titles, urls, alt tags, H1 tags, etc.  The most important items from a SEO standpoint are a pages Title Tag and the actual Copy or words on your site.  The Title Tag is a descriptive title that you give to each page on your site.  You will want to be sure that the title includes the best keywords that apply to the content of that page.  The keywords should be weighted so that the more relevant keywords appear towards the beginning of the title.  The other vitally important on-page SEO factor is the actual copy or words the page.  All pages should contain no less than 100 words and the important keywords for the page should be used in paragraph headings and bold print if possible.  These keywords should also be repeated throughout the copy with enough frequency so that the search engines can tell that certain keywords are more important than the other words in the copy.  This repetition is called Keyword Density.  One page cannot be optimized for more than two or three keywords / keywords phrases.  The optimal keyword density is from 2 to 7 percent.  That means that if the keyword 'Refrigeration' appears three times within 100 words of copy it would have a 3 percent density.  If a keyword has a density under 2 percent the search engines can't tell that it is relevant to the page.  If a keyword has a density of over 7 percent, a search engine could perceive that the author is trying to manipulate the search engine by a technique called keyword stuffing and result in actually lowering your ranking for that page. 

Off-Site SEO includes things such as inbound links from other sites, listings on Google Maps, listings with directory services, etc.  The most important Off-Site factor for SEO is quality inbound links.   Search engines rely on others on the web to give 'authority' to your site.  If other well ranking sites link to your site, the search engines will see your site as important.  In other words, if other quality sites deem your site worth linking to, your site must also be a quality site which is worthy of high rankings in their indexes.  The number of inbound links are not as important of the 'quality' of the incoming links.  If your site is about baseball and you have a football site linking to you, that doesn't help much.  A quality link is from a website page with content that is relevant to your web page content.  Although the other websites can use image links, banner ads and text links such as 'click here' to link to you, these are not the best format for establishing a quality link.  The best link from another site is a text link that contains keywords that you want your page to rank well for.  An example would be instead of the other site using a link like 'clich here', it would be better that they use a link such as 'little league baseball' if you want you page is optimized for little leage baseball.

The best part of a CMS is that the software will take care of formatting your programing code for the page.  You can simply concentrate on writing good copy and using relevant title and description tags.  These areas are covered in our SEO training video.