Is Your Website SEO-Ready?
Now in our 20th year of Internet marketing!
| Is Your Website SEO-Ready? |
| Friday, 13 May 2011 |
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Search engines are the dynamos that drive traffic to websites. For them to drive traffic to your website, you must first understand how they find your website and include it in search results. Search engines, like Google and Yahoo, typically find out about your website if another website they are currently crawling links to your website. With the blossoming of social networking, you can create a page on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or other social networking site and invite your friends to join and subscribe to those pages. On these social networking sites, link back to key pages to your website that you wish to promote. Make sure your links accurately reflect the content on the pages to which you are linking. The text of the link should describe the contents of the target page. Keep these social networking sites public so the search engines can find them and link back to your website pages. The search engines will then be able to find your website and crawl its contents. Making Your Content Easy To IndexThe search engine computers (servers) take a first pass at your website and analyze the content to make the best determination in understanding it. The pages in your website should do its best to make the analysis easier and more accurate. Here are some tips on increasing accuracy of the content: You perceive the page differently from how the search engine sees it:Search engines look at the source code that gets sent to your browser. To get a sense on what the search engine sees, right-click a web page and choose View Source, or from the View menu select Page Source. (Your browser may use different words, but they should have a way for you to view the underlying code.) The order in which the content is listed indicates the importance and relevance of the content. Why then, would the first element after the Search engines understand text, nothing else:If your website is solely Flash-based or one big imagemap, search engines will not have any way to read this information and categorize it. You can still have Flash elements in your page, as well as stylized images for text, but supplement your pages with real text. Not only will your pages load faster, but your pages will also rank higher in search engine results. If you do use stylized images for text, use title and alt attributes so text-browsers and text readers can relay the information to your website visitors. Use Title and Alt attributes:Use the Title attribute for links, and the Alt attribute for images. If you (or your website designer) are using an image as a link, keep the title in the Title attribute of the link, and change the Alt tag to be empty, like Meta keywords and description:Use them, and make them unique to the page. Even if Google may not use the description field to adjust result ranking, search engines still read meta tags for indexing and display the Meta description in the search results. Your list of keywords should be limited to just a handful to focus the search engine on the salient topic of your page. Also, keep your description under 255 characters; any more will usually be cut short with ellipses anyway. Keep Your Website Fresh:Update your website no less than once per month. Websites that are not actively updated will soon get ignored by search engines. Build your website through a Content Management System, like Joomla, Drupal, or Wordpress, to make it easier to add content. Contact ShoreShot! Web Design for more information on how to make your website more SEO-friendly. |
