SEO Best Practice

Content pages are the meat of websites and are almost always the reason visitors come to a site. Ideal content pages should be very specific to a given topic (usually a product or an object) and be hyper-relevant.
The purpose of the given web page should be directly stated in all of the following areas:
  • Title tag
  • URL
  • Content of page
  • Image Alt Text
The following example is of a well laid out and search engine friendly web page. All of its on-page factors are optimized.

Good Optimization

The content page in this figure is considered good for several reasons. First, the content itself is unique on the Internet (which makes it worthwhile for search engines to rank well) and covers a specific bit of information in a lot of depth. If a searcher had question about Super Mario World, there is a good chance, that this page would answer their query.
Aside from content, this page is well laid out. The topic of the page is stated in the title tag (Super Mario World – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), URL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_World) the pages content (Notice the page heading, “Super Mario World”) and within the alt text of the images on the page.
The following example is of a poorly optimized web page. Notice how it differs from the first example.

Poor Optimization

This figure shows a less search engine friendly example of a content page which is targeting the term “Super Mario World”. While the subject of the page is present in some of the important elements of the web page, (title tag and images) the content is less robust than the Wikipedia example and the relevant copy on the page is less helpful to a reader.
Notice that the description of the game is suspiciously similar to copy written by a marketing department. “Mario’s off on his biggest adventure ever, and this time he has brought a friend”. That is not the language that searchers write queries in and it is not the type of message that is likely to answer a searchers query. Compare this to the first sentence of the Wikipedia example, “Super Mario World is a platform game developed and published by Nintendo as a pack-in launch title for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.”. In the poorly optimized example, all that is established by the first sentence is that someone or something called Mario is on an adventure that is bigger than his or her previous adventure (how do you quantify that?) and he or she is accompanied by an unnamed friend.
This is as opposed to the good example which tells the reader that Super Mario World is a game developed and published by Nintendo for the gaming system Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Search results in both Bing and Google show the better optimized page ranking higher.

An Ideally Optimized Web page

An ideal web page should do all of the following:
  • Be hyper-relevant to a specific topic (usually a product or single object)
    • Include subject in title tag
    • Include subject in URL
    • Include subject in image alt text
    • Specify subject several times throughout text content
  • Provide unique content about a given subject
  • Link back to its category page
  • Link back to its subcategory page (If applicable)
  • Link back to its homepage (This is normally accomplished with an image link showing the website logo on the top left of a page.)

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