Moving on in the SEO series, we’ll have a look on basic on-page factor in SEO and link popularity. For those who miss the last few inputs, you can get’em by following links below.

• SEO101: Intro & Basics
• SEO101: Keyword Research
• SEO101: Competition & Market Analysis

After getting results from your keywords research and market analysis, you should be clear what’re your target keyphrases. with that, we’ll start doing some ground SEO work for your website, which is working on the on-page factors.

What are the important on page factors?

On page factors simple refer to stuffs you can control on your webpages, for instant title tag, out bound links, bold text, and so on. these are the basics and listed below are the factors that you must handle with care.

• Title meta tag
• Description meta tag
• Keyword meta tag
• Headers (H1, H2, H3, H4, and so on)
• Bold text
• Italic text
• Outbound links
• Keyphrase density (less important nowadays)

Be sure to use your targeted keyphrases in these on page factors. these might be basics, but sometimes it’s the basics that differ the top ranking with the rest.
In case you are wondering - yup, most blog/CMS platform do not implement good on page SEO. blog, or CMS theme designers always mix up the use of header tags… take this blog themes for example, header tags were used for useless category names such as ‘Blogroll’, ‘Blog Post in…’, or ‘Subscribe via email’… which makes no sense from SEO angle of view (or in representing the content of this blog). most blogging/CMS platform do not allow users to customize (or even add in) keyword meta tags - which’s another huge flaws in term of SEO. you might have a keyword list or a description for your blog - but that’s for every post in the blog, which leads to two problems: 1. misleading info about a particular blog post, and 2. risking the website’s ranking due to duplicated content filter. i’m not very sure about the solution for the issues, perhaps someone should (or already) comes up with a brilliant idea in solving the problem but that’s definitely not soufulow.

Building website link popularity

There were days when someone says SEO, it means building link popularity. that’s how close links and SE ranking connected. in oppose to on page factors, incoming links are by far the most crucial factor for a website to link well. if you want your website to rank well for certain keyphrase, just make sure that you have enough quality incoming links with the keyphrases (or related) embedded as anchor text. however, doing this is just not enough. you’ll need to make the SE bots to believe that these incoming links are natural… it doesn’t look natural when every incoming link has the same anchor text, right? (the price of not being natural, of course, is another SE filter, which will lead your website to rank on page 199th in SERP)

The trick is to make these incoming links as ‘natural’ as possible - meaning, your shouldn’t have hundreds of link with the same keyword anchor text, but rather, randomize the anchor text, mix up the keyphrase a little with other words to make it look… ‘n-a-t-u-r-a-l’.

A quick example, say your target phrase is ‘cheap shoes’. instead of buying or exchanging 100 links that read ‘cheap shoes’, you can varies the anchor text…

• Cheap Nike shoes
• Buy cheap shoes now
• Get real cheap shoes instantly
• Cheap shoes for you
• Browse cheap men shoes
• Browse cheap women shoes
• Shoes on offer price
• Low prices shoes
• Inexpensive branded shoes

Got the idea?
When it comes to link building, you’ll get more or less the same advise from the experts/gurus. i’ve read tons and adhere, i’ll present you…

The top 7 ways in building website link popularity

• Build useful content that’s worth linking (and pray for others to pickup your content and link to you).
• Link exchange with other RELATED websites.
• Submit your site for free to web directories such as dmoz.
• Submit your site to paid web directories, such as MSN BCentral.
• Buy links from link brokers or link sellers, such as linkadage.
• Comment on others blog, such as mine.
• Put up your links on your forum profile signature.

…and i believe that’ll conclude about the link popularity part.

Feeling too short on this? it’s. in fact despite the importance of link popularity for your website, it’s really nothing much to say… it’s a lot more to be done instead. how to make good content that drags other’s attention and link to you? how to control your budget when it comes to submitting and buying incoming links? how to bribe a dmoz editor? …these are the money questions that no one beside YOU, can answer for yourself.

Sidenote#1: LSI and SEO

To understand LSI you have to first understand LSA. Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a technique in natural language processing, in particular in vectorial semantics, of analyzing relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the documents and terms. In the context of its application to information retrieval, it is sometimes called latent semantic indexing (LSI).

How it relates to SEO?

Rumors said SE (Google!) implement LSI in their SE algo. this means when you say ‘cheap’, it also means ‘low price’, ‘bargains’, ‘inexpensive’, or ‘low cost’; this as well means if you wish to rank high with the word ‘cheap’ you need some good SEO factors on the related words (such as low cost, inexpensive… etc). and yes, i mean it when you’re building your incoming links or working on your webpage’s on page factors. you just need to consider the synonyms. which explains the example above, when i mention cheap shoes, i also mention ‘low prices shoes’ and ’shoes on offer price’ in the keyphrase list.

Logic, don’t you think?

You might be interested to read more about LSA at here, and here. it’s interesting to know.

Sidenote#2: Losing on SEO

I guess i’m being shameless when i talk so much about SEO here as my websites were surfering a very heavy fall on SE rankings recently. i guess the net’s changing so fast that it’s almost imposible to keep up with the competition, i guess i’m losing my stands with the arrival of web 2.0, and i guess the SEO world will soon to be the game for big players… i hope my guesses are wrong.