Optimize Your Website for Search Engine Use

Content still reigns as the king in the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Some websites get on top of search engine rankings because of high-powered link building campaigns, but when you talk about visitor loyalty and traffic retention (and yes, public consumption), it will always require that good old optimized content.

Steps

  1. Dedicate some time to writing really great content. The saying goes that you should write for people first and search engines second. This basically means you should be creating really quality pieces that are useful and engaging for humans because the search engines will recognise your efforts. Your readers will share your work generating additional backlinks, not to mention extra traffic, and search engines will recognise your quality piece because it will flow naturally with not too many keywords (something which is penalized in the post Penguin Update world).
    • Write content people want to share on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social networks. The search engine will read those social signals as a signal of the quality of your domain. You can accelerate the spread of your content on these sites by having an account on these social networks with lots of followers.
    • Consider submitting your content to sites like Reddit, Delicious, Digg and other content aggregators that might gain you a few readers.
    • Go back and SEO rewrite some old content. Chances are you know stuff about search engine optimization that you didn't know last year (not to mention changes in SEO best practices since last year). Re-visit some old content and re-write it with your search engine optimisation hat on, updating image attributes, changing keyword density, adding links to your home page and other relevant content on your site. Even consider republishing as a fresh article for extra brownie points with the search engines!
  2. Get links to your pages from other trusted websites.
    • Even if you are new to the web, you have natural links you could try to get. All businesses have suppliers whether they be accountants, solicitors or raw material providers. All these suppliers are bound to have a website, contact them to ask for a link back, but do not offer a link in exchange. Link exchanges don't violate Google's TOS, but they will now work against you. When building links, always give other site owners a reason to want to link back to you. Perhaps write an article based on a particular client - everyone likes bragging rights and this can gain you additional links without even having to ask. All Google wants to see is links that have an editorial right to be there.
    • Look to make use of co-citations (also known as co-occurrence). This is a way to show Google a link or relationship a website might have, based upon the site being mentioned from multiple sources. Generally co-citations do not have a direct hyperlink to a website.
  3. Complete all image attributes. Pictures dress up your pages but search engines don't really know how to deal with them unless you complete all the nitty-gritty details like title, caption, alternate text, description. Be ethical though, don't use it as an opportunity to cram an extra few keywords onto the page as this will likely have a negative impact on your search engine ranking. Some people search for what they are looking for via Google image search, if your image is highly visible then your potential customers will likely visit your page.
  4. Diversify internal anchor text links. There needs to be variations in the text when one creates those blue-highlighted anchor text links. The links on a page are what the search engine spiders follow in determining where they are being led. The text used in the links are used in helping the search engines figure out what the page it leads to is all about.
  5. Incorporate branded keyword terms. Incorporating your branded keywords into your SEO campaign is also important when it comes to link building and anchor text. If you continually use the same non-branded keywords as anchor text links throughout content it appears to the search engines that you are trying to manipulate search results for that term. Instead, you want to keep your anchor text linking natural. A good way to do so is to link to the brand a significant amount of the time, since that’s probably how someone with no SEO knowledge would link back to your website.
  6. Take note of word count. Although it’s been a classic rule that “readers online do not read”, it simply doesn’t mean that one has to deprive the online users of good, meaty content. Stick to at least 250 words a page. SEOs know that writing down for an appropriate length of text means being more able to include more related terms for the target keywords.

    In order to help with the page-browsing experience, consider using large fonts to draw the eye to key headline points. This will make for a page that is broken up well into sections that answer the question the reader is looking for.
  7. Avoid duplicate content. The content on your website should be unique from other pages on your site, and from external sites as well. Consider using a tool such as Siteliner to look for duplicate content.

Page Format Issues

  1. Title Tags
    The first is your page title. It’s very important to put keywords in your page title; specifically try to get important keywords first and try to limit the overall length of your page title. Well-constructed title tags contain the main keyword for the page. It should contain less than 65 characters with no stop words such as: a, if, the, then, and, an, to, etc. Your title tag should also be limited to the use of alphanumeric characters, hyphens, and commas.
  2. Header Tags
    Next, it’s important to look at the header tags on your site-h1, h2, h3, h4 and so on. H1 is the most significant. Make sure you have the most important keyword labeled as h1 tag. This will help you with ranking for your site, especially if someone is searching for that particular key word or phrase.
  3. Page Content
    Next up is the content. You definitely want to put your keywords in the contents somewhere, but the object, though, is to make sure the content is very well written for visitors to your website. You want to insert the keywords for that page only where it makes sense. Page content should have between 300 and 700 words of descriptive content that contains the keywords specified in the keywords meta tag for the page. You also want to try to optimize your URLs. Make sure to include important keywords in the URL.
  4. Meta Tags
    Next are the Meta keywords and Meta description. These are pieces of code behind the scene. The code should look something like this: It should be placed directly under the title tag code

    <title> Your site title</title>
    <meta name="description" content="your site description"
    <meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3"</br>Your keywords meta tag should contain between 5-10 keywords or keyword phrases that are also found in page content. Also one more important meta tag is description tag that contains information about the page's content so you can persuade search engine users to visit your web site. It should have 15-160 characters, remember not to stuff it with keywords.
  5. Navigation
    Next is to have proper navigation. Each page of your site should contain links to every other page so search engine spiders can find every page. This is an important step for the proper indexing and page ranking for your site.
  6. Site Map
    Next is having a proper site map. It's important to use two site maps for your website--an XML version and a static version. The XML version can be created by sitemap generators tools such as http://www.xml-sitemaps.com. The sitemap should then be submitted to the Google Webmaster Tools account for that site. This will aid in crawling of Google's Spidebot. The static version should be an HTML page that contains links to every other page. You should also reference your XML sitemap location in your robots.txt file.



Tips

  • Usage of JavaScript, Flash & frames. Search engines can't always correctly process links on JavaScript, therefore it is desirable to use them as little as possible. The elements of a site executed in Flash are not indexed by many search systems. If internal links of the project are made in Flash, the majority of search systems will not find these pages. Each time when there is a new page on a site, it becomes to the known search engine only when it will be found by the robot of the search engine. If the page is located in the heart of a site, it can occur very much at a distant day. Sitemap placing frequently solves a problem of indexation and site reindexation.
  • SEO-friendly content is no longer the restrictive, robotic-sounding content it used to be. Search engines, in their aim to continuously refine searching are catering more to the online readers, the social aspect of the World Wide Web. Content comes out to be more human-centered, and ready for consumption.
  • Adding images to your site is always helpful as when one is looking for a piece of information they also use image search.
  • While adding business make sure that all the fields are added correctly especially the category and areas served. Most of the times they are added wrongly that makes them to loose perspective search and leads.
  • If you have a local business, get listed in the Google Local Business search results. 86% of people looking for something offline will search online using the likes of Google and Bing. Even businesses like hairdressers and butchers can't afford to miss out on a spot of search engine optimization. Head over to the Google Local Business Centre and add your business to the map, that way your business info and contact details will appear next time a potential customer searches for a service you provide in your local area!
  • Dynamic pages are tough to index as they contain too many special characters. Some bots take a much longer time to index those pages or sites as well. Try to avoid dynamic writing of site pages.

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