On-site optimisation 101
Following my rant last week regarding the amount of work involved in SEO and companies that charge just $99 per month I have been inundated with queries regarding just what is Optimisation (as opposed to Internet Marketing as expressed in my post). See my post here. So, I thought it prudent to give brief summary of some of the elements I consider to fall into the on-site optimisation category.
1. Keywords and content
I have discussed before (see relevant posts here) some of the methods of researching keywords and the importance of selecting the right keywords for your website. The goal is to generate more and better quality traffic to your website. The rule is to focus on 5 to 8 keyword phrases. Your chosen keywords should be contained within the main content generously. The ideal situation is to have your main keywords at the beginning of the page and toward the end of the page. Keywords can also be made bold to emphasise them as long as this is done liberally. The most important rule however about keywords relative to the content is that the content must make sense to the reader (see my earlier posts on The Art of Writing Web Content).
2. Image Optimisation
Images should be labelled with your keywords and the alt text used to clearly identify the image using where possible your keywords. Alt text enables web readers with disabilities to have the image described to them. Search engines can’t view images either and so use the alt text to build up their database of information regarding your site. Using keywords in your alt text helps search engines build up a “picture” of your website.
3. Meta data
The use of meta data in the web page head is believed to influence search engine rankings less and less. However, there is some minimum data that should be supplied; including the author of the website, the date the website was created, the type of content (whether it is general or adult), and a description of the website. One of the biggest mistakes in meta data is to stuff lots and lots of keywords into both the keyword meta tag and the description meta tag. At the most the description and keywords should be about 250 characters long each. The text in the description meta tag may also appear in the search results so consider these carefully.
4. Title and heading tags
Earlier this month I posted a piece on the importance of links in which I discussed how a search engine page rank algorithm mimics the concept of referencing other published articles in a scientific journal or similar. As an extension of this concept search engines place weight to the structure of the document. The title of the web page therefore being considered the most important - that which draws the reader in and is most often referenced. Subsequent headings are given weight at a diminishing rate. Using your keywords in your titles tells the search engines that your keywords are important to the overall theme of your website.
5. Other optimisation techniques
There are other factors which are perhaps the most important. These mainly centre on the physical code of your website. Ensure, firstly, that search engines can index your website thoroughly. Search engines can not navigate flash (and many can not even read the content) or other fancy dynamic menus, therefore, ensure that all pages within your website can be reached through simple text based links. Text based links describe the purpose of the link better to search engines than image links (and once again you should use your keywords here). Moreover, search engines will deprecate the value of your website if they find dead links - that is, links that don’t go anywhere. Likewise, search engines do not like dynamic URL’s nor URL structures that are heavily deep in folder structures. The reason is that search engine programmers fear the search engine spider may become trapped within the website URL structure linking round and round within the site. Websites containing deep folder navigations and long dynamic URL’s (those usually containing the question mark) are often abandoned by search engines before the whole site has been indexed.
Finally, this is probably one of the least talked about elements and one of the most interesting for us at Xebidy. There are a few rules that should be applied to the development of all websites to make the search engine ready. One of the most important ones is the code to content ratio. In my opinion sites should be developed in CSS as much as possible thereby removing any formatting code from the actual web page and storing it in a separate file. Likewise any Javascript code for menus etc should be stored in a separate file. Code order can also be used to advantage. As I said before the higher that keywords appear in your content the greater weight they are given by search engines. If you main content appears higher up the coded page the more important it will be viewed by search engines. In this way if menus etc. exist in the left hand columns techniques such as relative and absolute positioning and floating the divs left and right can be used to not render the website correctly on screen without necessarily coding in strict chronological order.
These are just some of the main techniques we would use in getting your website ready for a search engine to visit and therefore index. However, as I clearly stated in last week’s rant these are only the start of any effort to increase search engine rankings and are certainly not sufficient to guarantee high rankings - nor maintain them!
Tags: keywords, search engines, SEO