How to Improve Your Search Rankings - A Guide to Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is one of the hottest topics these days in web design. The reason is that everyone wants to know how to improve the ranking of their site in search engines like GoogleTM. Increasing your ranking will increase the likelihood that someone will find your website. The purpose of this guide is to explain how you can improve your search engine ranking using some techniques that are not gimmicks. Yes, it's true, there is no "magic pill" for SEO. Actually, using techniques that attempt to fool search engines, are easily detected today and will actually hurt your ranking even more as search engines will penalize sites that use these types of methods. The techniques described here are all legitimate and proven ways to improve your ranking.
Is this a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) project or should I leave it to a SEO Professional?
The answer to this question is based on the level of your expertise. Some SEO improvements do not require a great deal of technical ability, however, the bulk of these are probably best handled by an experienced web designer. If you are reading this and are not sure about what is being discussed, then you are probably better off leaving it to a professional.
Where do I start? SEO Analysis Tools and Reports.
Obviously, you will need a place to start and some way to know what is wrong and what is right. There are some free resources on the web that can give you very valuable information and suggestions regarding what to do to make the necessary changes to your site to improve it's ranking. These tools provide a grade for your site as well as explanations of areas you are performing well in and ones you are failing or can do better in.
HubSpot - Website Marketing Tool
WooRank - Website Analysis Tool
I have an SEO report, now what? Let's look at home page elements that effect SEO.
So you have run your site through one of the SEO tools mentioned above, now what? The first thing we are going to look at is the elements of your home page that are critical to your SEO Strategy.
URL - http://www.yoursite.com
Your URL should be as short as possible, but as descriptive as possible. A descriptive URL is more easily recognizable by both search engines and your visitors. A visitor should be able to determine what the content of the page is by just looking at the URL. For example, http://awrwebdesign.com/about.php can be looked at and immediately determined to be a page that will give me company information about AWR Web Design. If the URL was http://awrwd.com/index.php?page=123456789 the content of the page can not easily be determined. So the basic rule with your domain name and URL's is to keep them as short and descriptive as possible.
TITLE - This is the title of your page that appears at the top of your browser window. The title tag is located in the section of your site's HTML and is contained between the tags
The title has a major impact on your SEO and there are a few key points to remember for having a title that will work for you and not against you.
- Your title should be between 10 and 70 characters. Having more than 70 characters could negatively impact your ranking.
- Your title should be specific and contain your most important keywords. 70 characters does not allow for too many words, so make them count!
- Every page of your site should have a unique title. Having the same title on every page of your site will negatively impact your ranking.
META DESCRIPTION - The meta description allows you to control how your web pages are described when a search result comes back to a viewer. Just like the title, the meta description has a big impact on your SEO and has some the same key points as the title tag.
- Your meta description should contain between 70 and 160 characters. More than that and you are not helping your ranking.
- Your meta description should be specific to the content of the page and contain your most important keywords.
- Each page of your site should have a unique meta description.
META KEYWORDS - Meta keywords are used to describe the content of your website. Meta keywords have been abused by spammers over the years, by trying to overload the tag with keywords in an attempt to boost their ranking in search engines. For this reason, search engines ignore this tag which means it provides little to no benefit to your search engine ranking.
HEADINGS - Heading tags to are important to SEO and therefore, your pages should be constructed using heading tags (H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6). You can think of headings as being similar to an outline, where the heading is the title of the section of content that is to follow. Your headings should contain your keywords with the tag containing your most important keywords for that page. To improve your SEO, you should only have one H1 tag per page.
IMAGES - Everyone loves images, right? They add to the boring text of the page and give your site's viewers something better to look at. Well that may be true, but images are too often incorrectly used on web pages and in turn negatively impact your SEO. The correct use of images can greatly impact your SEO and search engine ranking. Let's take a look.
While we see images on a web page, search engines can not see them. Therefore, images have an attribute that is used to help describe what the image is. This attribute is called "Alternative Text" or ALT. Every image in your site should have the ALT attribute described. Your image descriptions should describe the image. These descriptions are used by GoogleTM Images search results. This is also a great opportunity to throw in some keywords into your alternative text description.
Another factor in increasing the SEO of your images is to limit the amount of images on a page. Obviously, some images are necessary, but ask yourself, is this image relative to the content on the page? If it's not, then it probably should not be there. You should try to keep your images below 10 per page. The SEO tools above will tell you if you have too many images and also if any are missing the ALT attribute.
Another overlooked aspect of images is the actual filesize of the image. If your image's filesize is not optimized then your SEO will be negatively impacted. The number and size of your images will impact your page's load time, which is another SEO factor which will be discussed later. Therefore, it is critical to restrict the number and size of your images to optimize your website's page load time.
TEXT / CODE RATIO - As a good rule of thumb, the text content on your page should be at least 15% more than your HTML code. No rocket science here, the more keyword rich text you have on the page, the better your ranking for that page will be.
FLASH, FRAMES and AJAX - Three words here that will help your SEO. DON'T USE THEM!
Is your site compliant?
www RESOLVE (301 Permanent Redirect) - It is important that when your site url is typed in with or without the 'www' that it directs to the same URL. Example: If your site is set up correctly as http://www.mysite.com, then when you type in http://mysite.com in the browser, it will redirect to http://www.mysite.com. If after loading the page it still shows http://mysite.com then a proper redirect is not setup. This is corrected in the .htaccess file on the root of your server. There are plenty of sources online that will show you how to do this.
XML SITEMAP - An XML sitemap is a great way to tell search engines what pages are available on your site for crawling. It can also contain other information such as how often your content is updated and its importance. The best place to setup a sitemap for your site is on GoogleTM Webmasters Tools.
GOOGLE ANALYTICS - GoogleTM Analytics is a website monitoring tool that tracks visitors and site statistics for your site that will help you track the progress of your SEO improvements. It is highly recommended that you install it on your site.
W3C VALIDITY - W3C is a consortium that sets the web standards. You should run your site through their validation service to make sure your site's code is valid.
How popular is your site on the web?
BACKLINKS - This is probably the most difficult part of SEO, but it has the biggest impact on your sites popularity and ranking. Backlinks in a nut shell are links to your site from other sites. Sounds easy enough, but the all links are not created the same. The goal is simple; get as many quality backlinks as possible. What is a quality backlink? The more popular the site is that is linking to your site, the more heavily weighted that link is to the search engines and thus will increase the popularity of your site.
On that note, two of the best and hardest backlinks you can get for your site are links from sites with .edu and .gov domains. .edu are educational institutions and .gov are government institutions. Getting backlinks from these types of domains will greatly impact your SEO.
DIRECTORIES - Get your site listed on directories that are relevant to your sites topic. Do some searches for your keywords and look for directory services in the top 10 of the search results and see if you can get your site listed on those directories.
SOCIAL MEDIA - No doubt that social media sites are driving much of the traffic on the web today. Sites like Facebook and Twitter should definitely be something you should be looking into to help improve your SEO. Digg and Wikipedia along with many others should also be considered. My only advice here is do not waste your time getting involved in these social sites unless you are going to commit to using them regularly. Just having an account is not going to do much for your ranking.
BLOGS and FEEDS - In my opinion, this offers a bigger bang for your rankings and SEO than social media. Creating a blog on your site and submitting it to blog sites such as Feedburner can drive a great deal of traffic to your site and it eliminates the middle man, such as Facebook or Twitter. Create blog posts about relative topics to your website. Make them interesting and use keywords in the titles and body. The best part is that the post is on your website, not a third-party site, so you are gaining much greater relevancy for your site.
How fast does your site open?
LOADING TIME - How fast your site loads is becoming a major factor in rankings. Your site should typically load in under 1 second, ideally. There are many factors which affect page loads and you can find information about them all over the internet. However, the biggest one is image file size. If images are not optimized then they will increase your load time. Optimize your images and also ask yourself if the image is even needed. Eliminating unecesary images is the best way to optimize your load time.
These are the major elements of your website that can affect your SEO and search engine page rank. Every web site owner and designer should be placing SEO at the top of their list when it comes to improving their site's traffic.
Al Roberts
AWR Web Design, LLC
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