Improve your site’s
relevance and results with Search Engines
There are a
few issues that can affect your relevance and therefore, your results in the
SERPs . Clean design practices and great content will only take your site so
far. Search Engine’s look at various factors such as content, popularity
and history. What all these factors mean is that your site needs to be
knowledgeable about its content; be known for it and has to have been around
long enough to inspire confidence. Besides getting these 3 factors right,
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) comes into play to make sure you’re not
misrepresenting yourself to search engines. This basically means you need to
make sure search engines can find all your pages and that, from an html
point of view, you’re presenting your self the same way you’re presenting
your self visually to a visitor.
Content you have to create your self. This is one of the more
important aspects of your website and probably the hardest to accomplish.
There is talent to creating good content and, sometimes, outside help is
required for an effective one. You can make a decision on either to write it
yourself or acquire the help of a professional, and that’s wholly dependent
on your industry or niche market. One idea you'll need to understand right
away is that content is a lot more than just words.
Popularity is measured through links. Often you'll hear that links
come automatically if you put great content on your site, but don't be
fooled by that. It takes marketing to increase popularity. Content on its
own doesn't guarantee you anything. You can't market a bad thing, so good
content is more a requirement than the solution.
History is something that Search Engines are using a lot for various
reasons, but just think about it like a potential customer looks at your
company. The longer you exist, the trustworthier your business is, the more
stable your business is, the trustworthier you are, etc. History is
something that comes with time; you can't make your history be more than it
is. All you can make sure of is that your history is good.
Aside from
those very important factors there are a few things you can do to improve
the “search-ability” of your site by the spider bots.
1.
Use
Sitemaps (or equivalent file for the different major Search Engines) and
make sure that there is a link on the home page.
2.
Place
a robots.txt file on your site.
3.
Make
sure that all design files (CSS stylesheets, JavaScripts, etc.) are not
embedded at the top of the page but use external files instead. Test your
site to see what spiders see and judge how accessible your site is.
4.
Your
title, description, Meta tags and keywords are kept within the guidelines of
the major Search Engines.
5.
Customize each page on your site with targeted title, description and
keywords for every page.
6.
Use
relevant design aspects such as headings, bolded text, hot links, etc.
within page content.
Add a Sitemap.
Why? It's the easiest and fastest way to ensure that the SE's are aware of
ALL of the pages of a site in their indexes. Resubmit whenever new adds or
delete pages or content. This tells the SE's that site is updating with
fresh content.
How to Submit Your Site Map to Google, Yahoo! and MSN
Google's Robots.txt FAQ.
How do I use a robots.txt file to control access to my site?
Why use external JavaScripts?
HTML Tip: Reduce The Size Of Your HEAD
Read
Like A Spider
Look at how your page
displays in a text browser. The
Delorie.com Web site offers a free online
Lynx simulator that shows you how your
page will display in one version of Lynx. You can immediately tell if the
spider has to wade through a lot of navigation information, ad links, and
other information before it ever gets to the real page content. Look at
the simulation, then consider reading it aloud. That gives you an idea of
how your Web page might sound to someone using a screen reader. It's one
quick way to check the overall accessibility of your page.
Write a great Meta description.
Pay attention to the character limit as specified by the three major
search engines. Keep your most targeted keywords and phrases at the
beginning of the description. When it comes to Meta descriptions, most
often, less is more. The shorter it is, the more focused and targeted
it'll be.
SEOmoz | Making the Most of Meta Description Tags
Use unique titles and descriptions in every page.
This will allow focusing and targeting each and every product and
category. It's key in optimizing for find-ability.
Reverse-engineer the search process.
Think about it like a person looking for strawberry flavored cotton candy.
What are they going to type in to find what they want? "cotton", "cotton
candy", "sweet confections" or "pink cotton candy". In terms of relevance
to the most likely search phrase, a great page title would be "strawberry
cotton candy" and there's your page title.
Look at your description in the same way. Give them what they want to know
before they click.
Headings and other on-page factors.
These are all simple things you can use to make a significant impact on
how well you rank. You'll need to optimize them for each page.
In product pages, the <h1> heading should be the name of the product, or
the manufacturer's make, model or part number, if that's how it's most
likely to be found in a web search query. Category pages can simply use
the category name itself. Again, focus is key.
Last but not least, always remember to
design your site with the human factor in mind! The benefits of a good rank
or top position will mean nothing if you loose that potential customer due
to poor design or cumbersome navigation. Your customers will thank you for
it!
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