The top 10 onsite factors for seo
Most webmasters spend countless hours attempting to increase organic traffic by increasing the number of backlinks to their site. There is no doubt that high quality backlinks are critical to getting high search engine rankings. Even more important, however, is creating a site that's search engine friendly.
Here I've compiled the 10 most important onsite design factors for search engine optimization. Presumably you have already done your keyword homework and are ready to create or update your site. I will be covering each item in more detail and will be including links to free tools over the next several weeks.
1. Domain Name
I've already covered this in detail in another article, selecting a good domain name for your site. Your domain name should contain words that match your most important search terms, and the topic of your site. If you have a brick and mortar business name that doesn't already include your keywords consider adding them. For example, a cartage business using initials such as HCLD, could be regisitered as HCLDlogistics.com.
2. Title and Description Meta Tags
Ensure you write attractive title and description tags for each page of your site. The title and description must include keywords for that page.
3. Content
I could write a book just on optimizing site content. First and foremost, more is better, as long as you follow three simple rules. Make sure your text is text and not a graphic representation of text or the search engines won't be able to see it. Ensure you include your keywords within your content a few (2-3) times on each page, but don't overdue it or the search engines will reject the page as spam. Every page of content should be as unique as possible; don't copy and paste existing content to a new page and just edit a few sentences. Google and the other search engines check for duplicate content and penalize you for it. Whereever you place images on your site ensure you complete the descriptive "alt" tag so that the images are searchable.
4. Links
Placing refering links from one page of your site to other pages of your site is good practice and search engines like it. Referencing external links occasionally is ok, particularly if the sites have a high page rank. Avoid many external references especially if those sites don't link back because the search engines will penalize you for that. In any link the most imporant thing to remember is good anchor text. Don't ever use the type of link that says "click here." Instead the link text should always be descriptive, e.g. "logistics tips." See the full article on good links and bad links.
5. Robots.txt file
Ensure you create and maintain a robots.txt file in the root directory of your web-site. The file should tell search engine crawlers not to crawl pages with duplicate content and those that contain low quality content such as scripts and user information. There are many free online tools available online to help you create the robots.txt file.
6. Sitemap.xml
The site map file helps search engines organize and understand your site. Ensure you keep it up to date, and submit it to the major search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN Live on a regular basis.
7. Blog
This is a must in today's web 2.0 world. If at all possible, create a blog and post to it a minimum of 3 times a week. Ping major content aggregators, include links to major social platforms (Digg, Technorati, Del.icio.us, etc.), and use Feedburner to get a universal RSS feed.
8. Meta Tags
There are many meta tags besides the title and descriptioon tags. These are far less important tags, particularly to the major search engines, but still carry some weight, especially with the smaller engines which use more traditional ranking algorithms. Use appropriate keyword tags for each page of your site. Consider including your top 2-3 keywords on every page, and then add 1-2 additional keywords that specifically match the page content. I usually complete the meta tags as the final step before site validation because it seems like it's much easier to do when the site is complete.
9. Navigation Links and Breadcrumbs
I typically use more than one navigation system on my sites. I'll place major links at the top of each page, and then use a navigation menu tree containing all site links on the right or left of the main content window. Sometimes I'll also include about us, webmaster, and contact us links on the bottom of the site. This is good for the user and also provides valuable cross links for the search engines. You may also include breadcrumbs for even more cross links and to let users know where they are relative to the rest of the site.
10. Site Validation
Site validation takes many forms. First you should verify your code against hxtml/w3c standards. This ensures your site complies strictly with coding standards and will help the serach engine crawlers. Second you should verify your site with a crawling simulation, there are many free services available on the web. Lastly you should sign up for Google Webmaster Central and use the tools there to make sure Google can see your sitemap, internal links, and robots.txt file.
That's a lot to digest, and as I said off the top, there is much more to say on each item. Check back for more insight on each of these important considerations. This is going to seem like a lot of work, and it is. Trust me, this work will be worth it.
A good solution, particularly if you don't know much about web development, is to use one of the free content management systems such as Drupal or Wordpress. These systems have built in navigation systems and many modules to automate creating pages, add meta tags, manage content syndication, create robots.txt/sitemap.xml files, and much more. I will be covering some of these CMS products in future articles.
Good luck!
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