10 ways to optimize your website for better Search Engine rankings – Part 1

Over the past few years I have had the opportunity to create a few basic web sites for friends and family. Now most of these are 5-6 pagers with a little bit of content you put in there to only serve as a place holder at the time, so no real thought has been put into how this affects your search ranking. After adding some analytics on my sites, I saw most of them are pretty far down in the results. The following are some basic tips on how to get our page out of the gutter and in to a respectable search rank.

Keywords

Search engine spiders regularly crawl through the web to rebuild their indexes. When this happens you want to be sure that it is getting the right information for the searches to be accurate. The crawlers check the wording on your site and based on those keywords it will place your site in a specific rank when that subjects is searched on.

The Google Webmaster Tools can help you track your keywords and will help you get more accurate results. Here is an example of keywords not set up quite right:

As you can see for this Jewellery site, the word gallery was found double the amount of times more than the word diamond which is more in line with the business. Clicking on a word will give you more details around where this keyword is found. Remember that keywords are not just related to your content; they can also come from page names and other Meta data in the HTML. The gallery items below were all pulled from links on images:

HTML Headings and Paragraphs


Content on websites is often put straight into <DIV>’s or <TD>’s which will cause Search Engines to not be able to tell the difference between content and headings on your page. Whenever you are converting content for your page into HTML make sure that your headings go into actual heading tags - These are <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc. The text for your column should preferably go into paragraph tags - <p>.

A search engine will recognise these and then indexing will be much more effective. I myself never wanted to use these because of the predefined styles for these tags, but I have noticed that you are free to customise them and they will still work as expected. Here is an example of how a content area should look:

<style>

                h1{

                                color:#00FF00; font-size:12px;

                }

                p{

                                color:#FF0000; font-size:10px;

                }

</style>

<div id="content-area">

                <h1>Heading 1</h1>

                <p>This is where your content goes</p>

</div>

Links

Links play a very important role in helping search engines discover your site properly. Search engine crawling will move through your content, detecting your keywords, images, etc. – but for every link it finds it will be able to move to that page and index it. If you have set up your site properly you shouldn’t have an issue with search engines not finding a page, but adding links throughout your site to other pages will just help the process on and could potentially increase your search rating.

A good way to help the engine crawl is to specify a site map in Google Webmaster Tools. This is a little xml file that contains the structure of your site. It looks something like this

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

<url>

                                <loc>http://yoursite.com/page.aspx</loc>

</url>

<url>

                                <loc>http://yoursite.com/subsite/page.aspx</loc>

</url>

</urlset>

In much the same way you can also specify pages that you don’t want search engines to crawl by adding a robots.txt file to your site. This file usually contains URLs to places that you don’t want the public to find e.g. login pages, checkout pages, administration pages, etc. This file is also manageable through your Google Webmaster Tools.

Another thing to keep in mind on links is the way they are placed inside your content. Content owners usually create links on pages by writing something like “We have a gallery for bikes and cars, click here to view it”. This type of linking should be avoided not only because the words “click" and "here” are going to be indexed, but also because you could in fact use that space for more keywords.

Rather create descriptive links that can possibly help increase your page ratings in search engines e.g. “we have some cars and bikes in our gallery”. In this way the Search engine could display a link to that page directly when someone searches for “cars and bikes”, whereas with the other one it won’t find anything.

End Part 1