Posted by David Kenyon
Everybody wants their site to be found on the web. Everyone wants to appear at the top of the list. This isn't our goal. Strange? - maybe - it is however an objective, but we think the goal of SEO should be to increase site traffic and visitors and top listings will come with this. This is almost always overlooked in the scramble to the top. It's a distinction between visitors deciding what is relevant to find your site and what you think is important. It's a concept that is rarely covered when talking about Search engine optimisation or to use a phraseology we prefer, Search Engine Management. Below we have dissected the 'magic' to show you how you can make effective changes to your site to increase visitor numbers.
1. Title all pages
Specifically, each page should be titled according to the most important keywords relating to the subject on that page. Think of this page as a book index - use only 5-7 descriptive words arranged in order of importance that read as a sentence if possible. We like to add a company name on the home page.
2. Title all your images
, possibly with a subtext but also an ALT tag in the HTML.Search engines cannot read text in graphics, some can read content in flash though. Always have a HTML back up to any flash site and try to keep important content in HTML format. Our tip would be to highlight your whole page with the mouse will show you what text is selectable and therefore is not a graphic.
3. Title all you links
It may or may not help with listing positioning but it helps search engines with determining content and therefore indexing and is also a w3C standard for helping disabled visitors navigate your site more easily.
4. Add a site map
for visitors to enable them to easily find the content they want. Much has been made of the 3 click rule - and it is an important usability rule. Make sure the level of detail makes sense hierarchically. If you have a site map, you also have an instant link to each and every page. Add the site map link is on each page and you will ensure this. A site map can reduce the users clicks to just 2 if implemented with detail.5. Search engine site maps
Install search engine specific (e.g. Yahoo and Google) Sitemap to monitor performance and identify potential issues with your sites navigation. Companies like Google have a centralised website management console that also include features to help you manage your sites page indexing. As well as xml based sitemaps (not a scary as they sound), including a robots.txt file will help manage what is displayed on the world wide web and what is not. This can allow you to use your web space for business support applications that you don't want to be listed on the web.
6. Global site hierarchy
Build and develop your site with a real hierarchy of information. This includes organised and correctly labelled files and folders right down to page content. Use a piece of paper to visualise how this works best for your visitors.
Use relevant file and folder names for pages rather than 'page1', 'page2', etc. It will help with your site indexing. Similarly label images according to their content. If you change an image on your page also change its filename if the subject of the image is different.
Image searches are an important and overlooked part of driving traffic to your site. For sites selling products this is a must. The jury is out as to whether this will improve page position but as we mentioned in the intro you should be focused on driving traffic to your site.
7. Add new content periodically.
Ensure the content is unique, reference any quotes or duplicated material. The large search engine companies also suggest that content be written for human consumption and not for search engine consumption - you might be surprised to find out that these companies have very sophisticated applications to decipher if a paragraph is written with grammatical integrity. It is however still important to incorporate keywords into the content. We have set up sites specifically to test search engine guidelines and suffice to say it is a fine balancing act - it's best not to overstep it for long term success. 8. Metatags
Include description tags and keyword tags to each individual page. If you know anything about SEO you will probably have heard of Metatags. This historically was the first port of call for page indexing settings. While the value of Metatags are still the main way smaller engines crawl and index pages, the larger more well know indexes don't rate these as highly; preferring to use a global site formula encompassing all the elements we cover here, plus some others. Adding these tags will do no harm. As a starting point, we would advise choosing the most important keywords for your site and write them down in order of importance. Split them up into page specific words and include them on relevant pages. It's worthwhile checking your page content includes some of the same key phrases. Correct keyword and description tags are time-consuming and it mostly analytical work - worth every second though to get the best results. If we were operating this service for you we would also reference alternative phrases and measure this against the competition and the phrases popularity to determine which ones are used.
9. Incoming Links
The popularity of your web site is in part determined by how many incoming links your site has. You can find this using a third party service or using search specific URL code.
Don't use link farms - it really is the blind leading the blind. Your site becomes inextricably linked within pools of similar site doing the same thing. You can imagine it's not hard for search engines to determine which sites are involved.
Try and build quality links and if possible have descriptive words linked to your site. i.e.) johns tractors rather than click here.
Try and build links up steadily over time rather than all at once - particularly with newly built or registered websites - as you can imagine after 15 year the engines have a good idea of link building rates and trying to accelerate this can be easily detected by the web crawlers. Pay attention to site ranking; if you have an incoming link from a high score ranking site, your site will be looked upon more favourably than if it is linked to from a low ranked site. This link building action also helps to bring increased traffic to your site.
It may also be possible to include your link on some discussion boards and blogs. Keep it relevant to the page subject though!
10. Page content Hierarchy
Use headings, titles and sub titles. Not only does this provide good design and usability through readability but it lets the crawlers determine what is most important in the content. HTML headings are specifically tags (H1, H2, H3). Style sheets have mostly replaced heading tags and they have been forgotten. You should style your heading tags within the style sheets and utilise them to your benefit.
Summary
Here at Drawn we can summarise our search engine management service as 'Organised, labelled and titled content, hierarchically provided to the user for the user'. If you can truthfully do this then your work should be easily findable by web users.
While we offer this service as part of our portfolio, we aren't secretive about the methods we use. If you would like to use our services we will include all the above points and simply charge you for the time it takes us to analyse and set up your site fully. We think it will save you money as we have the experience and efficiency to do it quickly as we already have methods and procedures in place to achieve optimal success faster.
Everybody wants their site to be found on the web. Everyone wants to appear at the top of the list. This isn't our goal. Strange? - maybe - it is however an objective, but we think the goal of SEO should be to increase site traffic and visitors and top listings will come with this. This is almost always overlooked in the scramble to the top. It's a distinction between visitors deciding what is relevant to find your site and what you think is important. It's a concept that is rarely covered when talking about Search engine optimisation or to use a phraseology we prefer, Search Engine Management.
Below we have dissected the 'magic' to show you how you can make effective changes to your site to increase visitor numbers.
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