Many people do not place much value upon what is deemed "old fashion" html as it relates to top search rankings and on page optimization. We even heard a world renowned seo expert recently claim that ranking web pages is 95% link building and 5% on page seo factors. We might all feel like agreeing with this statement if we could also click a button and have our sites magically appear on our own network of 10,000+ web sites over a period of 120-180 days. Nice dream huh? However, for those of us who don't have this luxury, we need to get back to the basics of seo.
The basic mechanics of any good seo marketing campaign start with on page search engine optimization (seo). If you do not take care of at least the basics, you can throw away that 95% our Internet marketing expert told us was critical. This is especially true when you are considering search engines that are not named google. Yes, there are other search engines out there and big brother (google) shouldn't always be making the rules nor should we only be considering one search engine with our Internet marketing efforts. You can rank well in all the major search engines if you will take time to do proper on page seo.
1. CLEAN UP YOUR CODE! We have seen so many ecommerce solutions, wordpress blogs, joomla systems, dreamweaver constructed web sites , etc. that are poorly structured when you consider the coding that goes on "behind the scenes." Although we would never discourage the use of these very practical (and often necessary) web site development templates and software, we would recommend that you hire someone who understands the basics of html and can help you clean up the coding that they are based upon. In most cases, it will be impossible for you to completely streamline the html code, but you can certainly remove tens (or even 100s) of lines of code and this could very well be the difference between 1st page and 3rd page rankings in some major search engines.
2. Think that page headings are no long necessary or just look ugly and have no place in web design? Well, if you aren't using them you are doing your site a complete disservice. AND if you think the font is very ugly ......... You are 100% right. However, you can use a style sheet to get that look you are looking to achieve while not jeopardizing search engine ranking. Your web pages need headlines to form the very basic foundations for organic search ranking success. An even better idea? Try not to bury the h1, h2 and h3 tags so deep into your code. Having your h1 at line 20 is much better than having it on line 100. This seems to be a forgotten or excluded portion of seo that we feel is very important to giving your site the very best possibilities of Internet marketing success.
We have a lot more seo tips we can offer ....... Stay tuned!
On a side note, it absolutely amazes us how lackluster google has seemingly become in grading a web site based on that site's own merits (domain name excluded as they weight that very highly). It seems that google would rather have webmasters cheat the system over at Digg.com, Twitter, YouTube and Wordpress rather than spend quality time helping to properly identify the content on their own web pages and create fresh writings on their own web sites. Perhaps we are the only ones who see that trend, but it is undeniable in our study.