Everyone wants their site to be listed in top results on Google search. You would be an exception if that is not important to you, however for majority, the wish -- remains a wish only if concrete actions are not implemented for optimizing their site to suit search engines.
Let's first see how does your site appear to a web crawler also know as spider or automatic bot that visits your site looking for keywords & to index content on your web pages.
Design and Content
Key to success in search engine ranking comes from excellent design and content on your web pages. I am aware that everyone talks about good design and content, but what exactly is required in this area to be done? Follow the points mentioned below and your site would get a A+ rating by Google on any given day --
Design and Content Guidelines
- Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
- I hope you are familiar with the proverb "Well Begun is Half Done". Though we all know that to perform any action every person has to do the customary homework, alas not many really pay attention to a good beginning. We all want our sites to be out there on the Internet as early as possible. How long is your checklist for setting up a new project? Have you actually ensured that you don't have to add last minute links and pages or create something at the eleventh hour? If you have done your home work well, your site would definitely have a clear hierarchy and text links. Google loves such sites and you would be the lucky one to get indexed in search engines way ahead of your competitors. In case you haven't done your homework, now you should know why your competitor always stays ahead of the game, perhaps he is a better student in this field and takes his / her homework more seriously than you do!!! Is it end of the road for you? -- Nah, good thing is that Google really doesn't wait till the end of year to give you score, the bots are very obedient and sincere programs, and they would revisit your site soon, so you have time until the next visit to make correction and demonstrate that you too are a worthy student willing to please the teachers err Google I mean.
- Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
- It is often talked about, but not regularly followed. Your site must have a valid site map with links that connect a user to pages he / she wants to visit rather than going through a maze of clicks. The sooner it is for me to visit your site and jump to the page I am interested in, the better it is going to be for Google to index your pages and visit them and display them when required!!! Just like you and I want to get to the right information in shortest possible time, so does a search engine, and hence you should have a clear site map, especially highlighting important pages of your site in the site map.
- Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
- Ah, you already know all about content and information rich. Have you ever done a copyscape search to find out that your content is actually available on 100x sites on the internet, and the content is not as unique as you thought it should be. Well, you did modify the content when you took inspiration from different web sites so content you created is definitely unique -- I know, but sad part is majority of the folks on the planet have almost similar thinking patterns and replacing words with synonyms may not actually provide unique content. Paraphrasing is OK till a certain point, however if the gist or synopsis of the content is identical on 100 odd sites, odds are not in your favour to get a better ranking in search engines. Think out of the box -- write your OWN content, check with copyscape and modify until you are satisfied that you are not one in million providing the same information that other major players have already been providing for some good decades.
- Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
- I generally search Google a few times before I write my blog posts. It gives me idea on what is already available, what is available but requires more information and perhaps what is not at all available. The last one is rare though with Wikis floating all over the world in all languages and someone has already thought about most of the things that I think. A day back I noticed that my blog on wordpress has got few hits via search engine for the string flush domain resolution even today it gets listed on position 4 (as of now) and I thought let me see what change would come if I modify the keywords used for search. So search with flush domain came up on 12th spot and of course I don't appear anywhere with flush keyword. Not surprising but gives me idea with related words shown by Google, so flush dns may be the right keyword to write about next on my wordpress blog
- Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
- Does that require any explanation. If you have Angelina Jolie's picture on your web site, make sure that you also mention her name in the text (instead of writing actor photo on the left, it would be wise to write Angelina Jolie with Brad Pitt with Tom Dick and Harry from left to right)
- Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
- If you don't know what I mean, right click on any web page to read the source. Then do a search on Title and Alt and read what is written (if any) and whatever is written is relevant to the content or not. An image with Alt text helps Google or Yahoo to index and associate image with text. No Alt - No help in your endeavor to get good search engine ranking.
- Check for broken links and correct HTML.
- I hate 404 errors, I am sure you too don't like it when you click a link on web site. Ensure that your site doesn't have broken links, and your HTML code is proper.
- If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
- If you are using a good script, chances are they are already taking care of dynamic page content. Most of CMS scripts come with SEO Friendly URL concept making use of mod_rewrite feature to convert dynamic pages to show up as static pages. In case you have your own script, see if you could get it converted to SEO friendly URL format or at least try to reduce the parameters to a reasonable limit.
- Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
- Avoid hyper linking too many words in text. As a rule, keep the total number of links on any web page less then 100. Search engine bots don't like to spend an hour just indexing your site, and too many links may put them off ... something you wouldn't like for your web site. So give them enough just to keep them interested in content on your site, rather then trying to hit bulls eye from just one page. Spread the links on different pages, instead of ALL in One approach.
Cheers
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