Internet or online marketing is a term which some will say is outdated / old fashioned, however I still feel it perfectly encompasses what we have to offer. Marketing for those viewing whilst being connected to the internet, hence we still use the term.

This will be a series of basics for those just starting out in the industry, whether via education or work, prompted by a phone call in December 2012 from a 1st year marketing student, this reminded me how vital it is to learn the basics initially, how daunting lots of information can be and the value I got from basic blog posts many years ago!

For those looking for something more substantial, see here : inbound.org. For newcomers, enjoy and I hope you find it useful.

– Learn basic HTML : When you become more experienced this can be designated to a web developer, on your instruction, however it is much easier to understand how to optimise a web page and do on page SEO, with some HTML knowledge.

I will write a separate post on keyword research, however in the meantime lets use the keyword search term “SEO Consultant” as an example. At a very basic level keywords can start to rank in the Top 200 of search engines by doing some simple things.

– Keyword in the page <title> : This is viewable in the search results and at the very top of the browser. My site uses :

Tom Andrews | Internet Marketing Services – for our example we could write something like this :

Tom Andrews : Internet Marketing Services | SEO Consultant

– Keyword in the <body> text content : This is the main viewable text content on a web page. For example on my homepage I could edit like so :

I’m Tom Andrews, SEO Consultant, I’m 30 something years old and was born in London.

– Keywords in the <img alt> / <h1> / <em> / <i> : Personally I think just having the word in the content is fine, however you can do like so if you like :

I’m Tom Andrews, SEO Consultant, I’m 30 something years old and was born in London.

– Amount and standard of content : It is worth employing a good copywriter to write the content, too much, too little and bad spelling or grammar can effect a sites SEO performance.

I am notorious for writing too much in incomplete sentences, like a bunch of tweets thrown together! However thankfully I have good copywriters and this is something I am working on for this blog!

– It is also vital to ensure that the page can be indexed and crawled by the search engines : Most good web developers will do this as standard, however it is worth using some SEO Software such as Moz or IBP to check that this is the case.

– Avoid duplicate content : Once again good SEO software like Moz can tell you of any duplicate content issues, this is a contentious issue as it can also harm websites using the same content in 2 or more places for legitimate reasons. For example my examples above, taken from my homepages content, could be deemed as duplicate content, when just using as an example.

– Keywords in the URL and file structure : Having keywords in the URL sometimes enhances rank and sometimes damages rank. Some company names contain keywords naturally, if so be aware of any folder or file names, for example :

If my company name was Tom Andrews SEO Consultant and my URL was like so : www.tomandrews-seoconsultant.co.uk and I had an SEO consultant section and page, the file path could look like so :

www.tomandrews-seoconsultant.co.uk/seoconsultant/seo-consultant.html

…this page is unlikely to do well as it could be deemed as being over optimised. This would be better :

www.tomandrews.co.uk/seoconsultant

Or potentially this: www.tomandrews.co.uk/seoconsultant/seo-consultant.html

– Internal and external links : Having internal and external links can enhance SEO performance, however as with the number of keywords in a page or URL, this can be overdone. For example in a blog post, you could link to a relevant page of your site, such as my internet marketing service page, however not for every mention of this page in this post. It is also good to link to useful sites elsewhere, for example this excellent post on learning SEO, this gives more useful information to the user.

This has just scratched the surface of many potential on page SEO issues you could face, however it is a decent starting point for enabling websites to rank well for their chosen keywords.

I have ranked a few keywords for websites using good on page SEO alone (a few years back) and I have seen this done recently by competitor sites, however, as I will explain in the coming weeks and months, on page SEO and in turn SEO rank, can be helped considerably by content marketing, link building and social media optimisation.

> Resources :

https://www.distilled.net/u/home/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization

http://www.vtc.com/

http://www.lynda.com/

http://www.moz.org

http://www.seoprofiler.com

http://raventools.com/

It is also worth searching Amazon for SEO books.