I am often asked by clients for advice on how to best optimize their site’s page content for search engines. There are many articles available on the web giving plenty of good advice on this subject. The points below touch upon what I consider to be core good practice, I have passed this advice onto clients verbally on numerous occasions. Although this article may look a little lengthy, I’ve cut it down to the basics. This guide is targeted at Chameleon clients using any version of the Chameleon SoSimple content management system and is most relevant to general content and category pages.

Here are few points to read over before I discuss a working example…

1. Content is King
   Firstly remember this simple rule, good quality content is king, the phrase “content is king” is well known among web copywriters. Ensure you always write good quality English that is accurate in regard to the product/service etc of that particular page. Attempt to put yourself in the position of a potential customer, what search terms are they likely to search for that you would like your page to appear in Google’s listing for. (There are many keyword research tools that can help you on that note but that’s for another post).
2. Consistency
   Try to apply a consistent tone to your content throughout your site, this will be beneficial from both a site user perspective as well as within Google’s algorithm. If you have several staff at your business who will be contributors to site content, prove all those staff with some working examples of the style of content you are happy with. Have other site contributors proof read another users content and check for grammar, spelling and style consistency.
3. Don’t Rush!
   Taking the time to adhere to the advice I’m providing here WILL result in more traffic, I have seen on so many occasions, product descriptions entered via the cms which were obviously thrown together as quickly as possible in order to populate the website. I know all to well that populating site content is a long haul, but stick with it, take the odd coffee break, take a walk and come back refreshed ready to crack on!
4. Be Realistic with your expectations
   There are no short-fast solutions to search engine optimization, in most cases you’ll be up against a lot of competition with many other online retailers competing for the highest Google positions for their targeted key phrases. If, for example you have a shoe shop and want to start selling online, realistically its highly unlikely, no matter how much you spend on marketing, that you’re going to come on Google’s first page for the kephrase “shoes”. Apply common sense and choose more lateral keywords and phrases that have less competition.

So, now I’ll provide a working example of how to write good page content within the Chameleon SoSimple CMS. On this occasion I shall be demonstrating content from the Fight Superstore website, using a relatively generic key phrase.

The key phrase I’ll use is “mma clothing” which at the time of writing Google finds about 1,260,000 results and the Fight Superstore site currently appears in position 3 as you can see below.

See how that is a “generic” keyphrase, it is relevant to many products on the FS site. Essentially Fight Superstore had chosen “mma clothing” as their primary key phrase, with secondary key phrases being other MMA brands. Here’s how they added good quality content in the cms.

Page content – via the html editor

The Fight Superstore website is a commercially focused online retail store, its no surprise then that the home page is not full of reams of text content. I often speak to clients about the balance of content and design/selling features on their website. Yes, content is important, but so is the look and feel, bombarding a user with too much text content can easily turn a potential customer into just another bounce statistic and their straight off to another competitors site.

The home page intro content on the Fight Superstore site contains about 400 characters (with spaces) of optimized content, it is kept relatively short and concise, contains their primary key phrase “mma clothing”, business name and secondary key phrases, written in good English. It also starts with a sentence which is wrapped in a Heading H1 Tag. The first sentence within the html editor should be wrapped in a H1 tag, you can do this by highlighting the sentence and selecting Heading 1 from the format drop down list within the html editor tool bar. Note that there should only be once instance of H1 content within any page.

Below you can see the source code from the html editor in the CMS

<h1>MMA Clothing and Equipment from Fight Superstore, the largest UK range of the Worlds leading MMA brands.</h1>
<p>Whether it’s MMA T-shirts, MMA Gloves, Fight Shorts or Accessories we have everything here at Fight Superstore. Warrior, Tapout, Cage Fighter, Punishment, Silver Star, Hayabusa, Eternal Unlimited, Sprawl, Hostility, Clinch Gear, Triumph United, Fairtex, Throwdown, and many more top mma brands.</p>

Title Tag – the single most important tag on any page of your site

The Chameleon SoSimple CMS allows you to edit all your page’s primary meta information, this includes the title, description and keywords tags. I cannot over emphasize the importance of the Title Tag so use it well! Here’s my quick ref to writing your page title tag:

1. Ensure your tag is as accurate and concise a description of the page’s content as possible.
2. Try to keep the length at around 70 characters (Google currently truncates title tags at 70 characters (including spaces)), stick to a minimum of around 30 and a maximum of 120 characters.
3. Ensure each page’s title tag is unique, always avoid duplicating content.
4. Try to place your primary key phrase as close to the start of the title tag as possible. Now this can sometimes be difficult as you should also ensure it reads as good English.
5. Avoid using commas and special characters if possible, again this can be difficult, some times you can use a divider line ( | ) instead to split phrases.
6. If the tag is on your home page, add your site/business name to it.

So lets take a look at the Title Tag for the Fight Superstore home page, here it is…

MMA Clothing and equipment from Fight Superstore | Tapout, Cage Fighter, Warrior, Sprawl plus more top MMA brands

See how it adheres to my 5 points above, primary key phrase at the start, contains their site name, contains secondary key phrases and generally reads well. Also note how the content compliments the actual page content, ie the title tag contains some of the same wording as within the page content (this is very important!)

For those of you are not aware of this, see how the title tag is displayed at the top of your browser window as you can see below.

Description Tag – less important but still used by Google!

The description tag should build upon the content you added for the title tag, varied a little and ideally broken down into two short sentences. Again as a general rule of thumb, stick to guides as I mentioned in the points for the title tag above. Try not to spend too much time on the description tag, because in most cases the actual content on your page will be given much more scrutiny by search engines.

At the time of writing, for the search phrase “mma clothing” google is displaying the meta description within its results and so is proof that the description tag is still used in Google. However the general opinion amongst web masters is that the description tag holds little relevance these days.

Here is the meta description for the Fight Superstore home page.

MMA Clothing and Equipment in the UK  from the leading MMA brands Warrior, Tapout, Cage Fighter, Punishment, Silver Star, Hayabusa, Sprawl, Fairtex, and more. MMA T-shirts, MMA Gloves, Fight Shorts everything here at Fight Superstore.

See how it is essentially an extended version of the title tag, containing a little more descriptive information and broken into two sentences.

Keywords Tag – even less important but still relevant

In recent years, due to over usage by spammers, it is of general opinion that the keywords tag holds little relevance. Although there is still patchy evidence that some search engines do still us them. So, simply add a list of comma separated keywords, max of around 15, and only only enter keywords that actually exists within the content of the page itself. Start with your primary keyword, including keyword variations and plurals.

Here is the meta keyword content for the Fight Superstore home page.

MMA Clothing, Fight Superstore, Tapout, Cage Fighter, Warrior, Hayabusa, Sprawl, Fairtex, MMA T-shirts, MMA Gloves, Fight Shorts

Primary Image Alt Tag

Image alt tags also play a role in on page optimization, the Chameleon SoSimple content management system allows for easy editing of all category and product image alt tags. We also added a feature to our platform that allows you to edit the alt tag of the very first image that Google will spider, from the top of your page down. This tag is in most cases actually assigned to your company logo. With the Chameleon CMS it is possible that every single page of your site can have a different alt tag assigned to the first image on that page.

We recommend simply entering one key phrase inside each page’s primary image alt tag filed in the cms. Do not stuff the field with a long list of comma separated keywords as search engines will consider this as spamming.

The alt tag assigned to the primary image alt tag on the Fight Superstore site is simply “MMA Clothing”

Page File Name

The Chameleon CMS allows you to write a custom file name for every page on your site, this includes all general content pages, categories through to individual products. Here’s my recommendation for file names.

• Ensure you place your pages primary keyword or phrase within the file name but don’t “stuff” your file name with extra keywords
• In general shorter is better but ensure your file name is descriptive, the file names you write will be visible within Google’s search results so you want them to look attractive
• Always hyphenate separate words, don’t use special characters or spaces

That just about wraps up my basic guide to on page optimization, I hope you put this information to good use, shortly I’ll be writing a guide to on page optimization at product specific level, explaining how to get the best out of the Chameleon SoSimple CMS.

Good luck and feel free to post any comments below.