“Semantic Code” – sounds familiar right? The buzz word among web development community. Even if you are not related to web development; I know so many SEO experts who are aware of optimized HTML coding structure. Semantic Code is nothing new. It’s the same old concept of writing good codes and concentrate on content structure. Making the content structured not only with css style but also within codes itself.

In an Example We can easily make a sentence Bold, Big and with different color using css, so that it looks like a Header within a placeholder. So a possible coding style can be like this:

<div class=”head”>
  This is a header of this section!
</div>

This is absolutely a bad practice. Lets say if you have 2 more sub headers, what might be the worst scenario?

<div class=”head”>
    This is a Main Header
<div class=”subhead”>
    This is the subheader
    <p>A paragraph</p>
</div>
<div class=”subhead”>
This is another subheader
<p>Another paragraph</p>
</div>
</div>

I have seen codes written like this too. What’s wrong with this coding style? Sure it will work if you are fine with CSS and give them a good look. All you need is to get the class of each container and give necessary styling elements, browser will be happy to show the website as you want to! But is that should be the way of doing this?

<div class=”content” role=”main”>

<h1>This is the Title</h1>

<h2>This is the first Header</h2>

<p>A paragraph</p>

<h2>Another Sub Heading</h2>

<p>This is another Paragraph</p>

</div>

Search Engine Optimization is shortly known as SEO that uses for appearing among the top listing on SERP. There are three ways ranking our pages: White Hat,Black Hat and Gray Hat. We will discuss about White Hat methods all over this article on Search Engine Optimization.

To optimize a web page  Internally,There are some criteria which are shown below:

Choosing Domain Name

Each and every web site has its own domain name which is unique. The Domain name represents our website. We have to bear in mind that Domain name should not be long. Domain name is also considered as a keyword.

Using Meta Tag

Search engine doesn’t see as we see a web page .They only can see the code and it is very important to have a clean code. Meta tags are part of our web pages code and they have great importance. Meta tags have thee parts, We are going to discuss those one by one:

• Title Tag

We must include our keyword phrases in the Title Tag and we should set the Title at the top of the page.
The code for Meta Title:<title>HERE IS OUR TILTE</title>

• Description Tag

The Description Tag does not have any effect on SEO and Ranking. We should use Description to make people click on our website. Description Tag is actually say what our site is in short. Description should not be long than 200 words.
The code for Meta Description :<meta name=”description” content=”THIS IS OUR DESCRIPTION” />

• Keyword Tag

Actually, The Keyword Tags have no effect on our On-page SEO and Ranking also. We have to use keyword tag to tell Search Engine for what keywords to Rank over web page. Keyword should not be more than 10 words.
The code for Meta Keyword:<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword1,keyword2,….” />

Introducing Heading Tag

Placing our keyword phrases into the Heading Tag is another thing we should do that will optimize our On-page SEO. H1 tag is most important and we should also try to include our keyword phrases into our H1 and H3 tag Headings within our post.

Utilizing Page Content

Large content is much better than short content. We have to use keywords in our body content. We must keep in mind,density of a keyword should not be more than 3-5%. Page contents should have Bold,Italic,Underline on our keyword phrase. We will use all 3 but don’t overdo it and will try to use them once in every 100 words.

placing Internal-Linking

For SEO, Internal-Linking is very important. We can build Internal-Linking by using anchor text.
The code for Internal-Linking:<a herf=”http://domainname.com”>Domain Name</a>

Applying Image Alt Tag

Search Engine bot can’t read any image. To overcome this problem we have to use alt tag.
The code for Image alt tags:<img src=”IMAGE FILE PATH” alt=”IMAGE NAME” />

Frankly speaking, i am not an Expert in Search Engine Optimization and still learning. I shared some of my knowledge with you. If you have any query about the topics you can post and also can share your Expertise knowledge with us in our comments section.

[Related reading: Speed up wordpress blog by reducing external request ]

Choose perfect heading for your article:

This is in-fact the most important of all. Let me give you a small example. Type this phrase on google “optimize posts for search engines on wordpress”. You will see near about 447,000 results found. use these key words separately on Google Trends. You will see the relevance of each keywords. Here the data is scaled based on the average search traffic of the term you’ve entered. So if you can insure to have perfect heading with defined keywords searched by major traffic then your chance to get hits increases a lot.

Use your title within your posts:

Have you seen this posts already used the title twice? Which means when Google will scan the post it will get more relevance with the title. Try to insert your title phrases you keywords technically so that your search engine hits get a rise.

Be consistent on heading:

Be very consistent while using headings within your posts. If you give your title a tag <h1> then don’t use it again within your post. It is just like writing a thesis or published article. We always keep relevancy on heading there. Like If the title is <h1> then a section heading will be within <h2> and if a section has sub heading they will go with <h3>.

Bold your keywords, give them some weight:

Have you seen I am using bold on this post? If you have a clear look you will see I only bold those words which are relevant to this post topic. It helps robot to get determine proper keywords. because you are matching your giving keywords given on meta tags.

Choose proper keywords:

While choosing your keywords for your meta tag on <head> section try to insert keywords taken from your written posts. Especially those which are marked as bold. In example for this post: keywords should be ‘optimize wordpress’, ‘posts for search engine’,’SEO’,’perfect heading’,’keywords’ etc.

Final Touch

I am not a SEO guru, but a blog writer and website developer I have to use few of these techniques. It works for me. I have seen many of my posts gets higher ranking by using these simple steps. Hope it will work for you if you can use them properly. I would like to thank Mr. Asif Anwar, one of the pioneer on online marketing specialist from Bangladesh;  who gave me initial ideas about these simple steps when i was in London. Now its your turn for discussion. Please reply using our social comments options.

I just tried some new search on how to optimize or remove unwanted elements from header file? I really liked three post. Bellow are the three Links from which I have taken references for this post:

• Removing wp_head() elements (rel=’start’, etc.)
• Cleaning up wp_head
• Remove unwanted WordPress header elements

I found these post really helpful and like to share some of my understandings with you:

Problem with wordpress wp_head()

wp_head() is a action hook for plugins which is used in HTML <head> tag in wordpress header.php file. It is used so that plugins can include their additional functionalities within <head> tag if necessary. Now the problem with this wp_head() is that it do have some of it’s own element itself which you can find in view-source page of your template. Have a look:
[code lang="html"]

The tag :

[code lang="html"][/code] is unnecessary if you do use different rss feed element like Feed Burner in your blog. Moreover it conflicts the original title tags as well. In some cases few social networking services like “StumbleUpon” get confused which title it should follow!

How to remove?

Remember removing the wp_head() element is simply designers choice. It is up to them. If you really want to use core Jquery link given by wordpress, want to write your blog using Windows Live writer then you should not remove these elements. One simple solution might be just remove the wp_head() from your header.php file. In that case it may hamper your template because  these Action hooker helps your template to work smoothly. What we can do is, to remove each single element inserting few codes in your function.php file.

Open your function.php from your Editor from wordpress admin or with notepad from your local PC. Now add following codes according to your interest. I have removed all of them because I already had substitutes for my template and most of them were useless for me.

Remove the links to the extra feeds such as category feeds

[code lang="php"]remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links_extra', 3 );[/code]

Remove links to the general feeds: Post and Comment Feed

[code lang="php"]remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links', 2 );[/code]

Remove the link  EditURI link

[code lang="php"]remove_action( 'wp_head', 'rsd_link');[/code]

Remove  Windows Live Writer manifest file

[code lang="php"]remove_action( 'wp_head', 'wlwmanifest_link');[/code]

Remove Index Link

[code lang="php"]remove_action( 'wp_head', 'index_rel_link');[/code]

Remove wordpress Generator

[code lang="php"]remove_action( 'wp_head', 'wp_generator');[/code]

** please be aware removing this link means you might have problem while upgrading your wordpress automatically form your admin dashboard.

Remove Start, Prev and current post link

[code lang="php"]remove_action( 'wp_head', 'parent_post_rel_link');remove_action( 'wp_head', 'start_post_rel_link');remove_action( 'wp_head', 'adjacent_posts_rel_link');[/code]

Remove Additional Jquery Link

If you include all your jquery script source manually in your <header> tag in that case self included jquery reference is an excess for you. We do have on function wp_deregister_script(‘jquery’) , But the we cant include this one in function.php file. It is because it inherit code wordpress admin panel jquery functionality. In that case (Thanks to Falcon to notify us) we just need to open our header.php file and include the code just above wp_head(), as follow:

[code lang="php"]wp_deregister_script('jquery');wp_head();[/code]

Thats all the basic wp_head() element you may want to remove to keep your <head> tag clear. Though some plug-ins will contradict with their own generated script like JavaScript or style sheets in that case you have to go more deeper. You just need to open that plug-ins main php file and try to find [code lang="php"]add_action('wp_head', 'plugin_function_here');[/code] after you do know the name of the plug-ins function just go back to your function.php file and include this code: [code lang="php"]remove_action('wp_head', 'plugin_function_here');[/code]And it will work fine.

Hope this discussion may help you guys. Please let me know if I missed something.