The Best Way To Practice Search Engine Optimization Seo
Since creating our first website, we have learned a lot about what works in getting search engines to crawl and understand what your page is about
. We have since created sites, which provide great examples of optimized pages. Ill outline the theory used in laying out our sites to improve its readability by search engines.
This article is not about ranking higher in search engines. Thats the next step. Its about structuring your content in such a way that search engines will understand it and index it better.
Let me now just explain the logic here. Think of a search engine as a stupid computer program, and understand that the program is programmed to read the data on your website in the form of a semantic hierarchy. The html on your site is really designed for people to read, so the trick is to also design it so that search engines can read it as well, in a way that doesnt interfere with what people see. A well designed SEO page will not affect your page design AT ALL.
By semantic hierarchy I mean the program is looking for the following items, in this order to determine a pages content:
- Domain name
- Pages Title
- Pages URL structure (excluding domain)
- Pages Sub-headline
- Pages Sub-sub-headline
- Pages content
- Bolded and italicized words within the content
- Links within your page, linking to internal pages (breadcrumb trails, left navigation and right article list)
- Links within your page, linking to external websites
Ill go through each section with some tips on how to improve it and explain the logic for search engines and people, where the change will effect what people see.
Domain name
If someone owns "plum-trees-are-delicious.com" and you start an article called "plum trees are delicious" they might get higher in search engine results for "plum trees are delicious" if anyone links to them, because domain names are the most important element in most search engines (since they are not editable, unlike html).
Pages Title
Always include your sites name (like Plum.com) and the actual headline for the page you are at. (Plum.com | Benefits) in your title tags. Search engines give this a lot of emphasis.
Pages URL structure
If all of your pages have dynamic extensions (like .asp or .php) and use query strings to point you to different dynamic articles youre making a mistake.
An example of a bad URL would be:
http://www.plum.com/contest.asp?contest_id=1163
This is bad for two reasons:
Page Rank effects articles at the document level, which means query strings are excluded (so you wont develop separate page ranks for different articles all will share the same rank).
Some search engines and stat logs cut off the query string when indexing your content. Having a link in someones stat logs or in a non-Google engine that point to
"http://www.plum.com/contests.asp" is useless and is a wasted opportunity to get more visitors and page rank.
Pages Heading & Subheadings
Dont use fonts and CSS to make a headline appear big. Wrap it in H1 tags instead.
A note to SEO exponents: This tag is not as deprecated as you might think. h1 is still semantically telling the search engine "this is the most important headline on this page" h2 are less important for sub-headlines, but if you have sub-headlines n an article, using them can only help the spider understand how your content is structured and that is a good thing.
So long as you style the h1 in the CSS the same way you have been making larger headlines in the past, users wont visually see a difference at all.
Best of all about this tip is that very few sites make use of it.
Pages content
This is your keyword text. Just make sure you have alt and title tags for all images, so search engines can read them. Id use h3 for all captions under the images, since images and the captions that explain them are usually important to the article. Search engines place minor emphasis on words that are put in between bold and italic tags in your content. Very minor emphasis, but just worth noting that if an article is about a certain celebrity for instance, and their name appears multiple times, bold each appearance of the same and it will help the spider think that celebrity is the focus of the page.
Dont keyword stock though. Search engines will notice if the same words are appearing too often (called keyword density) and it will annoy your users in any case, so dont try to stuff your page with redundant keywords. Always write your articles for your users.
Links within your page
You need to make your navigation load before the pages content, so that spiders can access the rest of your site. You can use CSS to make this not affect your positioning of the navigation. This will help your links get indexed better. When a spider visits your site it sees the page as one huge block of html code, no matter how its laid out, so where in this block certain elements are placed is very important. Remember that using CSS you can have an element display visually to users first on the page, even if its the last thing to load in the html text block for spiders. If those links are all at the bottom of the text it interprets it as not important, and in some cases may not even download enough of the page to see them (some search engines only download the first 50,000 bytes of html).
Link to your sitemap prominently on your homepage, if you have one. If you dont, then make one. This is really for the search engines more than the people, but it should even be helpful for those people who do see it.
All links in your page should include title tags. title="blog"
Links outside of your page
When linking to any content that isnt related to your site (lets say youre plugging a blog article about technology you enjoyed, but your site is about cat food), always add "rel=nofollow" to the hyperlink or else Google follows it and gives some of your outgoing page rank to them and also may assume that your sites are similar (since the logic is that sites only link to other sites that will be interesting to their visitors).
Here is what I mean: target="_blank" rel="nofollow" title="great read"
Conclusion
If you do all this then this will have a substantially positive effect on the reach of your website.
by: Paul Rigby
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