Search Engine optimization top tops
#1) Targeted keywords and key phrases
Identify what are the key search words and key search phrases are that would be used by your prospects browsing the internet to find your web page and use Google Keyword tool to refine your list. Note, that I did not say web site, I said web page, because a good search engine optimized web site will optimize each page. Yep, it’s a lot of work to craft each page in a unique fashion but boy is it worth it. After all what is the point of a web site if your prospects cannot find you?
It is extremely important to adopt a targeted approach, tailoring the keywords and key phrases to each page.
Do not dump a high volume of keywords on each page. Why? because once we have identified the key words and phrases they will be used multiple times on multiple elements of the web site...see all of the items below:
#2) Avoid the generic: use URL's with integrated keywords/phases
Let’s presume that you have a company selling ‘funky widgets water filters’ and the domain is www.yourwidgets.com and you have determined that your key search term is "funky widgets".. Most web sites are developed from generic templates and the products section of the site would have a URL similar to this
www.yourwidgets.com/products.htm
Do you know how many companies have a URL that ends in /products.htm ? What to you think that a search engine does with that? Not much. However, if you use a URL which has your keyword embedded…
www.yourwidgets.com/funky_widgets_water_filters.htm
…now we have given the search engines to work with. Now we can fine tune this further by building a unique page for each product (in this example we will use funky widgets faucet water filters) with that product’s key word e.g.
www.yourwidgets.com/funky_widgets_faucet_water_filters.htm
#3) Use unique Titles on each page
This is extremely important and is where most web sites fall down because of the amount to details and grunt work involved. Clients are often reluctant to put this much effort into their site and most web developers are happy to cut and paste if the client is not driving the program to save costs but to restate: this is imperative for a web site to be found by your prospective customers. Keep the title tags under 66 characters and include the key search words/phrases.
{this is the title tag…}Get clean water with Funky Widgets Water Filters
A Funky Widgets Walter filter will provide your home with pure, clean, water.
www.yourwidgets.com
#4) Fully optimize your meta tags
There are two meta tags of particular interest for SEO and those are
- the description meta tag
- the keyword meta tags
In the actual example, from Google, below, the key words are bolded and you can clearly see the connectivity between the Title Tag (the first line in blue) and the description tag (the second two lines in black) and the web page URL (in green)
The description meta tags should be unique for each page, 150 characters long, max., and must include key words/phrases which are unique to that page.
Although you cannot see your key word meta tags as they are part of our web site code, they are there and they should be unique for each and every page. While you can have many key words with value are those that are reflected in all of the above and the content of each page. Key words which are not included anywhere else on the web site have little-to-on value, in our experience.
#5) Use Alt and Title attributes
Web pages, often, do not clearly label them selves. In the example below the title tag provides a better description of the web link with keywords included…<a href="http://www.yourwidgets.com/ " title=" Funky widgets faucet water filters and accessories " target="_b lank">Click here</a>)
The alt tag is important to label the image for search engines and includes the key words
<img src="images/water_filter.jpg" height="250" width="250" alt=" Funky Widgets faucet water filter " />
Also, Title Attribute is a W3C standard for making your page accessible to disabled people.
#6) Avoid the generic: image labels
All labels should include keywords and avoid the generic like the plague!
Image example:
Do not use: img1224.jpg or photo1.jpg (or any generic label)
Use: funky_widgets_faucet_water_label.jpg (or any name that is specific to the image including a key word)
#7) Create a site map
Site maps permit web crawlers to quickly navigate your web site to find content. It is that simple and the search engines love them! Click to see a sitemap example.
#8) Create a sitemap.xml file
Site maps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URL's for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URL's in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. Click to see a sitemap.xml example.#9) Use a robots.txt file
A robots.txt file embedded into your web site root file can inform search engines to search the entire web site of can be used to block folders from being scanned by the web crawlers by adding the following to the robots.txt file .
The following code is the robots.txt file for this site. The first line of code welcomes all search engine spiders to crawl the entire web site but lines 4 and 5 excludes the folders 'cgi-bin' and 'case-studies' from the prying eyes of the crawlers. Lines 2 and 3 point th robots to the all important, as described above, sitemap files.User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://webdesign-ri.com/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://webdesign-ri.com/sitemap.htm
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /case_studies/
To see the actual robots.txt file from this site click here .
#10) Use a search engine webmasters account
Okay, so you have done all of the above and how do you know if it all works? Open a webmasters account and monitor the performance of your site.
I cannot overemphasize how important this is. Check it out the Google webmasters and Yahoo's Site Explorer and Bing's webmaster tools
