Google’s love affair with links has forced many search marketers to focus most of their efforts on link building. However, many significant gains can still be made by properly executing on page SEO. Of course, gone are the days of meta tag stuffing or endless keyword repetition. But there still exist a few tactics that are extremely effective.

1. Title Tag: Still the single most important on page SEO variable. I’ve seen a single change to the title tag bring in thousands in monthly sales for clients. The key is to use relevant, rankable keywords.
2. H1 Tags: Second to the title tag, an H1 tag is the second most influential onsite variable. In the past, some web designers have disliked using it because it makes the font extremely large. However, with an external style sheet, you can use an H1 tag at with any font size you wish.
3. Contextual Linking: Linking to another page on your site from within the body of text is extremely powerful. Basically, you should create links on your site as if it were an external site. Create a network of pages all linking to each other by different means. Vary the anchor text to create diversity. Avoid keyword stuff links within navigation, as site wide links are very ineffective.
4. Original Content: Don’t expect your pages to rank if you are copying and pasting content from another site or syndicating content. The SE’s love original content.

On page SEO can still be very effective. Leave a comment if you have know any additional strategies that have worked for you.

About Palmer Web Marketing

Justin Palmer is an eCommerce, SEO, and Web Usability consultant that offers Christian Internet Marketing and specializes in SEO for Church websites.

I’ve noticed a trend in the Google SERPs lately. Google seems to be
integrating their different vertical engines such as Image and Blog search, into
the normal search results. For certain search queries, you even see a few images
appear above the webpage results.

With this change in the way Google displays results, website owners must
place additional focus on optimizing for image results. By taking a quick look
at your log files or analytics software, you might be surprised to see you are
already getting decent traffic from image searches.

The following tips will get you started with optimizing the images that
appear on your site.

Alt Text: Probably the most significant factor in ranking for an image
search is the contents of the image alt property. Basically, the alt text should
contain a brief description of the item as if you were explaining it to a blind
person. After all, the original intention of this property for the vision
impaired.

Surrounding Text: Google will weigh the surrounding text heavily when
in determining what the picture is about. Be sure to place relevant keywords
above and below the image you are optimizing.

Image File Name: Another important factor is whether or not keywords
are in the image file name. For example, if you were trying to optimize for the
word “Christian t-shirt“, you might name the image christian-t-shirt.jpg. Of course, it
always difficult to optimize this way if you are forced to go back and change
the name of existing images. Keep keywords in mind when you are naming them in
the first place.

Anchor Text: Although it’s somewhat uncommon to link directly to an
image that’s not in a web page, you can greatly increase your ranking by using
relevant anchor text in the hyperlink just as if you were optimizing for a
webpage.

As people’s search preferences become more sophisticated, the popularity of
vertical search engines will grow. In addition, Google and other SE’s will
likely continue to mix results from various types of content.

Please leave a comment if you’ve used any other tactic for image SEO or have successfully used any of the above.

Lately, I’ve been quite disturbed reading articles and blog posts about negative SEO. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term “negative seo”, let me briefly discuss the topic.

Negative SEO occurs when a malicious part (often a competitor) create hundreds of junk backlinks to your site in a short amount of time. It’s common for the anchor text of these links to contain spam words like “online gambling” or “viagra”. The most common source of these links are from Splogs (SPAM + BLOGS) created using a free blog account.

Google sends up a red flag anytime you acquire too many backlinks too quickly, especially if the links look spammy.

As this unethical practice seems to becoming more common, how will Google respond? How will their algorithm know the difference between ethical seo links and spam links?

Has anyone heard of a way to report negative SEO? Please leave a comment if you have any ideas.