Welcome to my introduction of search engine optimization (SEO), in this I will cover optimizing your design, and how to increase your websites search engine position in the major search engines. When it comes to running a website that will be successful in the search engine results, there are three factors that will get you the farthest in your endeavor, and influence your rankings in the three major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing).
Content is king
As I have mentioned before, content is the most important element of your website, no matter how much time you put into the rest of your SEO campaign it’s important that you spend the time or money to get the best quality content possible.
To develop this great content you have to know what people are searching for so you can target these keywords. You should start by using a keyword tool to find out what people are searching for that way you will know which keywords you have to target when writing your content. Just including these keywords in the meta tags is not enough, you will have to work them into the body of your page, and it should sound natural and be easy for your visitors to read. Keep in mind that you don’t want to over do it with the keywords though, some people think the more they use a particular keyword the better off they will be. In fact it’s quite the opposite, while you want to include these keywords in various places throughout the page you will want to keep the density around 4.5%.
As I mentioned earlier you will want to make your content easy to read, by this I mean don’t stuff in keywords where they won’t make since. After all don’t forget the main reason you created a website in the first place, I’m sure it wasn’t just to rank well in the search engines. If your keyword density is a little under there’s nothing to worry about, it’s better to have high quality content that your visitors will enjoy rather then some keyword stuffed piece of garbage.
Also you will want to keep your content fresh, this is because the longer your site goes without receiving fresh content the lower your search engine rankings will drop. This is why many websites start a blog, enabling them to easily add fresh content often.
Link Building
This is quite easily the second most important factor when it comes to SEO, and in some cases it can prove to be the absolute most important. Building links can help your site gain authority and add value to your existing content, as well as bring in visitors.
Let me simplify this process a little bit for you. Let’s say that your website is a person in a popularity contest and that links to it are votes for it. This may sound simple enough, however there are a few twists and turns in there one of them being that not all votes are equal. This is because the major search engines look at many different factors to determine the value of a link. Here are just a few of the metrics they use:
- Strength of the page with the link
- Is the rel tag used
- Number of external links on the page
- Anchor text used
- How long has the link been in place
All right now that we know some of the factor they will take into account, it’s important to remember that none of this will matter unless they have crawled and cached the page which the link is on. The amount of authority you gain from the link depends on the strength of the page, and the amount is divided between all of the links on the page.
Links that contain the rel tag, more specifically the re=“nofollow” are pretty much useless when it comes to counting for anything in your quest for search engine ranking. These may still be good links to have however depending on how much quality traffic you get from them. These types of links are normally found on blog comments, advertisements, paid links, or links to a competitors website.
Search engines also take into account the age of the link, if it’s a brand new link you will probably not get the full effect of the link. This is because search engines strive to provide quality results to their users and if they let every link count right away there would be much less quality in the results. The aging process usually takes up to 6 months and you will start to see more and more effect from your link as time goes by.
Optimize your website’s design and navigation
This is a very crucial step in the whole process and if done wrong can cause your site to be omitted from the search engines index all together. There are many different issues that a website could have and most of them are pretty easy to fix if you find that your website has some of these defects. Here are some examples of what not to do:
- Use a javascript based navigation
- Offer your site in https only
- Use automatic redirects as soon as a visitor enters your website
Those are some of the worst things you can do if you have a website, but there is still more less severe things that may be harming your rankings. Let’s take a quick look at something’s you should do when setting up your website:
- Use static URLs instead of dynamic, most content management systems come standard using dynamic URLs but often have an option for you to change them. You opt to change them to the static version and when setting them up try to include some keyword phrases in them.
- As I mentioned in the step above try to include some of your keywords in the URL, or in your files / directories. This will help to increase your keyword density, it may also help with click through’s from the search engines by letting visitors see some more relevant information on what they are looking for. Just like with your content it’s important that you don’t over do this and make them look and your site look spamy.
- To go along with the URL structure you should also leave off the file extensions. This can cause a few problems for you, the first one being that it’s harder for a user to remember your sites URL that way. The second reason the leave them off is if you would like to change your site and have to switch programming languages, very big problem if you have many links pointing at index.php and now you have default.asp.
- When you create a new site or even if you have an existing one you should create a site map for it. This will help the search engines to find all of the pages on your website. After creating a site map you can submit it to all the major search engines, some may require you to create an account and if you would like more information about how they are crawling your site you may need to include an extra file or meta tag for verification purposes.
- You shouldn’t keep changing your websites structure, just try to set it up right once and be patient. Chances are that you did it right, but these things will take sometime before search engines site acknowledging your new design. If you keep changing this may actually hurt your rankings.
One last tip on website design and structure, if you have an older site that may still be largely table based you may want to think about updated to use CSS for your layout. This will help by reducing your content to markup ratio, thus reducing your overall page size. This will benefit you by increased page loading speed, and also if you have a larger website search engine limit the amount of disk space your sites cache can use.
In conclusion
While this may seem like a lot it’s really just what the title says an introduction to SEO. There is much more that goes into creating a successful website, but the best way to learn is to just jump in and get started. Running a successful website is time consuming and quite a lot of work, but I think that you will find it very rewarding experience.