10 Tips to get your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) engine started.
Written by Eddie Rosenthal, Higher Source Sites
A study in 2004 indicated there was about 3% of the web indexed by engines, and at the moment (Mar,2009) estimates put the number of web sites around 250 Billion. With millions of web pages being returned for most search engine queries, it is hard to argue that it is becoming increasingly difficult to be among the top ten for your website! This article will try to show some things you can do by yourself or in concert with your webmeister to help put your site in the game.
Web crawlers, those programs that run continuously searching for hyperlinks and doing the grunt work of indexing your pages, will find your site eventually and without your intervention. But you might be able to benefit by knowing enough about the page’s content to point out to the engine what is relevant to index, and what is most important about your pages. You do this in several ways;
1) Your page title, the words that go in the < Title > tag is considered by far to be the most important piece of information you need to tell the search engine. But you must limit what you say here with not more than 70 or 80 characters, before the engine goes dumb and thinks you are starting to spam it. It is probably far better to tell what your business does, than just your business name, and will be better if you give some regional ( city, county name) location than your business name. Why? Because likely the future client does not know your name, but is looking for your plumbing service in sonoma county and typing that phrase in.
2) Your Meta-tag for keywords and descriptions are still important but probably more for the yahoo engine than google. It still is important to put those in but be careful not to dilute the keyword area with too many keywords, or too little. It is probably better to have the exact text from the page in the meta description or meta keyword than not have them at all, as long as the text is concise and describes your service or product. It is good to know if the keywords have attracted too much attention ( competition ) so that you have a chance of being found – if the ‘plumber in sonoma’ returns over 50,000 pages, it might be a good idea to find another phrase that people use – ‘relilable plumber in sonoma’ might work better. The only way to know that is to do some research on the keyword phrases – you can do this with one free tool that google has at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. This tool allows you to plug in keywords ( short tail or long) and helps you determine if that phrase gets any traffic or not. To pick a good short or long tail keyword phrase you must probablhy find something that gets less than 50,000 but more than say 100 a day. Once you have picked out your phrases they go into the keyword meta tags, and into your document, but not too much. About 7% density of the keywords is a good percentage, any more than that and the engines will think you are spamming them.
3) Your graphics should load fast, in other words be optimized for the web. That means you probably have to put your jpegs thru some sort of photo editor like photoshop or fireworks, to make sure they load under two seconds. Nothing will turn off a user than to see how slow your pages load. One site that helps you figure out loading speeds of your images is at http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/. I like to push my clients URL’s thru this free tool to judge quickly how much work I will have to do just with their graphics.
4) Another important point about graphics is that crawlers can’t read them. If you are using graphical text on your page it probably is good looking, but it won’t help your SEO. There are ways to textualize what you need over the graphics, say with Cascading Style Sheets, or sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement). Using a few lines of javascript with a flash file embedding the text you want, allows the engine to be able to read your text. But you don’t want to overuse this technique either, as it will slow down the loading process.
5) It used to be considered that the page structure should be architected like a newspaper page, with titles, headlines and sub headings. And most SEO optimizers still think this is true. ( see http://www.sempo.org/learning_center/ ) for more information about current concensus on any of these topics above). I believe it is natural for the eye to want to see this hiararchy in order to digest quickly important information, before being attacked by too much information overload. So I believe it is important to have < h1 > tag have the most important information of the page at the top, with < h2 > sub headings below that. You can adjust the sizes of the fonts using Cascading Style Sheets, so that it is not an eyesore, and the search engines will read these tags and store them as important pieces of information about the page.
6) All the above should have text corroborating relevance by reusing the text in the headings and in the keywords and title. But not too much. The engine will think you are spamming. Every text I have read says the page’s copy should have about 200-400 words. So if you have 7 important keyword phrases, they need to be repeated in the text, and have headings or subheadings as well. It might be better to have more keyword density by having less verbiage, but make it relevant.
7) Images should have good naming conventions, which in the broader sense applies to page naming conventions. It is nice to have a ‘contactus.html’ page, but also it might be better to have ‘how-to-contact-reliable-plumber-in-sonoma.html’ as the page name. Why not? Search engines have learned to read and digest and index, so why not make the page name say something useful?
Alt tags – those ‘tool tip’ messages when you mouse over the graphic, can contain useful information for the engine spider(crawler). Why not make good use of that? ‘Logo of plumber’ is better than nothing. ‘Logo of Reliable Plumber in Sonoma County’ is even better.
9) Consider creating a user friendly sitemap, if you have five pages or more. Because sitemaps just index your site for users to navigate, it already contains the prime ingredients for search engine crawlers. You link your sitemap by putting a link to it in the footer, or in your regular navigation.
10) Create a special xml file to submit to engines. There are tools that help you submit a readily digestible file that has all the links of your site embedded in it, with text describing the site and the link. Once you have created the xml file you can go directly to google (search for creating an xml file and submit to google) for more information.
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