Today, we have a guest post by Eva Vesper, one of the masterminds behind Web Hosting Search, a search engine that allows you to view ratings, reviews, and compare hosting packages from various companies. Hopefully you find her article useful!
SEO has become an important element of any website project. A website is optimized for the search engines will as a result rank better and receive more traffic. But many site owners still neglect to apply search engine optimization, even though more than 80 % of site traffic is generated by search engines. The point of optimizing your site and code is to make sure that Google and Yahoo see the same things that you or me as humans see. If you have bad code, these little bots will get confused and run away, neglecting or misunderstanding what could be very good content on a website. To properly optimize your website here are ten basic tips on how you can improve your site.
1. Friendly URLs
Implementing desired keywords in the domain name is one way to increase rankings in the search engines. Another, though commonly forgotten, is applying the same strategy for all the URL-strings of the site.
WordPress users should change permalink settings to /%category%/%postname%/ so that the category and post title are included in the URL rather than display as www.yoursite.com/cat=9 or post=1. For example, here on PresidiaCreative, a post is titled, 10 Sites to Find Free Vectors. To make it easy and friendly, the URL is http://www.presidiacreative.com/10-sites-to-find-free-vectors/ . Easy as pie, a user knows immediately what is the post subject instead of seeing: http://www.presidiacreative.com/post145.
2. Using the noarchive and noindex tags
Not all of the content on your site has to be indexed or crawled by search engine spiders. About pages and Privacy policy pages are good examples of pages that can be ignored by spiders..
As a caveat, if you install a WordPress theme or Drupal theme, be sure that a global “noindex” is not placed. I have seen a web designer’s blog that had his whole site noindexed. Now, how would anyone ever find his site? Check that code!
3. Don’t use images as your links on the site (excluding banners)
When a search engine crawls your website, your task is to make all content as readable and available as possible. Using graphic images instead of texts for links is not recommended as it only makes it harder to read for search engine spiders. It also creates an accessibility issue because some browsers are not able to read images well. Your user could end up with a blank site. And if that construction worker image is still on your site, get rid of it too.
4. Create a XML sitemap
Search engines like Google give no guarantee when your website will be indexed. Months may pass before your site appears in the search results. Adding a sitemap will speed up the process and make it easier for the search engine spider to crawl your site and properly index your content; though it is no guarantee still You can go to http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php . Google Yahoo, MSN and Ask (formally Askjeeves) use the same structure for XML sitemaps. If you want more information about Google sitemaps, read this article .
5. Keep the footer links to a minimum
Search engines care little about footer links. Bottom based links should primarily be used as a navigation option for the visitor and include only internal links that are not displayed in the main link menu.
6. Use All in One SEO for your WordPress blog- Meta tags and HTML title matter
Adding meta data is a efficient way for you to tell the search engines what you want them to display every time your site is listed in search results. There you can include the keywords you want and describe the site or page to get the search engine users attention. WordPress does not come with meta tags and require the installation and activation of All in One SEO Pack. Unfortunately, All in One is only available if you have real WordPress Hosting, not a WordPress.com hosted site.
7. Don’t Abuse <h1> and <h2> tags
Using headers and sub-headers is not only useful to structure site content, but also makes it easier to see a visual layout of a page. Proper header tags are also appreciated by search engines. But whatever you do; do not overuse header tags as it will only loose its structural purpose and value for search engines.
Remember how you do bullet points in MS word? Work your site the same way.
8. Put the alt tag and description for images
Unlike text, images are invisible to search engines. By always filling in a description in the alt tag you will simply give the search engine spiders ratable information about the image. Again, this also plays in accessibility of a site; if a user cannot view the image they will see the ‘alt=’ text.
9. Blogroll List of 100? Trim it Down
Too many external links on a website is never good. So when you are building a list of links,for example a blogroll, make sure to keep the amount of links in check. Too many will decrease their value and make it hard for the reader to follow.
10. Clean Up Useless Code.
Again, the purpose of optimization is to make your site and its content as available and readable as possible for search engine spiders AND for the visitor. This goes for the code as well. By validating your code in the XHTML validator at http://validator.w3.org, you will ensure that code is readable.
As WordPress put it so finely, Code is Poetry.
all in one search engine
Some good tips, thanks!
“even though more than 80 % of site traffic is generated by search engines.” A lot of websites with heavy traffic take advantage of social networking websites. 30%+ alone can come from social networking websites easily.
Great tips overall.
Some good tips. Thanks
good article, usually i create my blog with wordpress script and seo platinum wordpress plugin to do search engine optimization. for me wordpress is the best
I was searching for website traffic related blogs. I have read some of your posts and they are good. Thanks for providing some good information about this topic.
I usually don
What type of RSS feed do you use here, because i can’t seem to get it working with my reader…
hopefully I’ll figure it out because I like this place!
I strongly recommend that you turn the No Follow off in your comment section. I’ll watch Google Webmaster Tools, and if the links don’t show up after a couple of weeks — I won’t go back to that blog again. Another suggestion: you should have a Top Commentator widget installed. Do Follow and Top Commentator will ensure that you have a successful blog with lots of readers!
Well written and and got some very good points regarding SEO
Glad you enjoyed, Richard!
True,very true. I’m glad someone pointed this out.
wow amazing!
I hadn’t considered the ultimately simple ways a search engine like Google operates. The truth of the thing is that Google indexes your page countless times, it still takes a metric tonne of due work on your part in order to get a page to become “relevent” to the spiders. This lends to my knowledge of search engine optimization.
That’s new.I’ve considered the plainly simple ways Google worked in. The truth of the thing is that while a spider looks at your page multiple times, it still takes a ton of due effort on your part to get a page to become relevent to the big G. This will add to my knowledge of Google!
Cheers for the great info m8
I will keep that in mind ! Good article , some of this tricks i have missed !
Hey , I’ve just posted a little something similar just about 10 Things We Forget SEOwise When We Start a Website | Presidia Creative on my site yesterday. How small is the internet
Thank you very much for letting your 10 thing about SEO i really enjoyed your tutorial.
MCSE