SEO is the short form for “search engine optimization” or “search engine optimizer.” It refers to the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.
Thorough optimization helps search engines index – images, videos, and most importantly the content in local, and also industry-specific vertical search engines to enable better presence to websites.
Search Engines always follow a very distinct strategy while indexing any website. Mainly they are focused at what people search for.
Optimizing a website to catch both search engines’ as well as users’ attention involves editing content, HTML and associated coding in order to increase relevance of specific keywords.
Search engine optimization is also a process that effectively utilizes search engines to visit the website. It is an ongoing, continuously evolving, high maintenance process which includes the customization of a site for better search engine rankings.
Many SE Optimizers or consultants provide useful SEO services for website owners, including:
- Reviewing your site content and site design.
- Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
- Content development
- Management of online business development and other online marketing campaigns.
- Keyword analysis and e-search
These are some generally used, basic guidelines for Search Engine Optimization
Create Site Map and Google XML Map
Every website irrespective of its niche and volume needs a Sitemap. Sitemap should be linked to and from every page on your site. A site map will help users , search engine spiders and search engine robots to find all the important pages on your site with just a few clicks.
Smaller sites can use second navigation bar in the footer that will act as a small mini site map. By submitting a XML Sitemap to a search engine, you are making easier for that engine’s crawlers to crawl and index pages of your site.
Avoid too much Flash
Flash might look pretty, but it does nothing for your SEO. Search engines cannot index pages made entirely with FLASH. According to the Search Engine Journal, “Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page… we advise not to use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX in moderation for best SEO results.”
Keywords research and analysis
Before building a website one should be able to decide why they need a website? What they want to showcase?.
Next important step is to find keywords and phrases that relate to your theme and niche, analyze them and pick most relevant and commonly used ones but they also should be keywords in “demand”.
Targeting the correct keywords results dramatic increase in the quality of traffic visiting your site. Therefore, it is recommended research about what keywords people are most likely to use when they search for your site or niche.
Note -
It would be a waste of your time to optimize your website for keywords that nobody is even searching for. The most popular resources to find high search volume keywords are WordTracker, KeywordCountry and KeywordElite.
Optimizing the Title Tag
The title tag is displayed as the first line of text in the row at the top of any browsing window. The title tag is an extremely important factor during the optimization of a web page for search engines. Since title tags include much of targeted and highly competitive keywords it attracts significance from Search Engines.
The title tag is also what the search engines usually use for the title of your listing in the search results.
An ideal Search Engine friendly title tag will be about 5-10 words (60-80 characters in length) it should be straight to the point. It is advised to have at least one main keyword in title tag but don’t stuff all of your keywords in it.
Note: make sure that the Page Title Tag is relevant to the content on the page and EVERY page should have it’s own Title tag.
Optimization of your page content
Web Page content is another important factor in order to achieve better search engine listings. Content not only provides information that a visitor needs, but also includes conscious keywords which many a times match with – page titles, content, URLs, and image names.
Your content needs to be fresh — updating regularly and often is the key for increasing traffic.
One way to ensure that your site gets fresh content frequently is to incorporate a blog. An executive blog is an excellent way to reach out to your clients, which on the other hand creates more opportunities for internal and external linking, while giving your site a more private voice.
Page content tips:
- It is recommended that each page you submit should at least contain 200 words.
- This text should be inclusive of your most important keyword phrases.
- Include the phrases that you have used in your other tags (i.e. metas, alt, headings, title, etc.) during the optimization process.
- Add additional content pages to your site. For example, how-to articles, hints and tips, tutorials or newsletter etc…
Optimizing the META tags
The head element contains general information (meta-information) about a document which is used to communicate with search engine spiders/crawlers.
Meta tag is used to provide information that is relevant to browsers or search engines like describing the content of your document. Some search engines will use the name and content attributes of the meta tag to index your pages.
The most important META tags you need to utilize in your webpages are:
1. Description 2. Keywords 3. Robots
Since many webmasters have used meta tags for spamming purposes, like repeating keywords to give pages a higher ranking as a result of it many major search engines have stopped using them entirely.
Tag limits:
- Keywords tag should not exceed 1024 characters including spaces.
- Description tag should not exceed 250 characters including spaces.
Meta description tags:
The effective META description tag consists of 25 to 30 words or less but using no more than 160 to 180 characters total (including spaces) or else some Search Engines would not consider it Search Engine Friendly.
- Make sure to accurately describe the content of your page while trying to pull visitors to click on your listing.
- Include 3-4 of your most important keyword phrases. Especially those used in your title tag and page copy.
- Try to have your most important keywords appear at the beginning of your description. This often brings better results.
Meta keyword tags:
We recommend only those keyword phrases that are being used in the copy of your page, title tag, meta description, and other tags.
- Optimal Keyword Meta Tag has 25 to 30 words max.
- It is not advisable to repeat your keywords no more than 3 times or search engine will consider it as spam .
- If your site has content of interest to a specific geographic location be sure to include the actual location in your keyword meta.
Robots tag
Robots tag will let search engine know if you want a particular page to be or NOT be indexed or to follow or not to follow the links on a given page
Optimization of images using “alt”
Spiders can only search text, not text0n your images — which is why you need to make the words associated with your images as descriptive as possible.
The alt attribute is used to define an “alternate text” for an image. The browser will be able to display the alternate text instead of the image if the browser can’t load images.
It is a good practice to include the “alt” attribute for each image on a page, to improve the display and usefulness of the document.
Adding an “ALT” tag allows you to include a keyword-rich description for every image on your site. We recommend on using 2-3 words for each image and using it where ever possible.
Use Deep Linking and Anchor Text
Search engines use complex algorithms to observe whatever you are linking to, should be something closely related to the content of your page.
Some search engines look for keywords in hyperlinks and in the surrounding text of the hyperlinks. Use your most important keyword phrases in the link itself and possibly the surrounding text.
Note: Use your website URL, your company name and some times different but related keywords in anchor text of inbound links.
When you exchange links or submit your website to directories you want to link to as many pages on your site as possible as this will tell search engines that you have a lot of good and worthwhile content.
One can acquire different links like Reciprocal and One Way links. In fact getting many possible inbound links have become #1 priority in SEO world as it will take your website to a higher Page Rank and therefore higher rankings in Search results.
Optimization of Heading Tags
Headings are labeled with <h1> to <h6> tags. <h1> defines the largest heading. <h6> defines the smallest heading.
Header tags will tell the search engine the “words” that are imperative in the context of your page. <h1>,<h2>,<h3> and other heading tags are used to highlight important keywords in the page.
With that in mind consider using keywords relevant to the page’s content (theme) in your Header Tags.
The best practice is to place your primary keyword in your <h1> tags and your secondary keyword into the <h2> tags.
Think of an <h1> header tag as a title for the content you have on your page and it is advised to have only one h1 tag on a particular page. h2 and h3 header tags should be thought of as a sub headings for your page.
HTML heading tags can help improve your listings in the search engines as some of the search engines use them in the analysis of your page content.
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