Tag Archives: google
SEO Website Development Considerations (Page 1 of 2)
Google uses hundreds of different signals and criteria to rank your website. There are many overlooked SEO considerations that people often miss when designing a website. Work with an SEO expert to develop a cohesive optimization strategy before you begin any work on your site.
Keyword research
Good keyword research is essential to the success of a successful of any website marketing campaign. A descriptive, yet keyword rich domain name is imperative to your success. Choose keywords for your content that are relevant to your business or industry. You want to have terms that have a good search volume but are not too initially competitive.
It takes time and effort to go after high competition phrases. A good strategy is to have more immediate, attainable keyword goals and get ranking for those first. Continue to revisit your targeted keywords as markets and search patterns fluctuate often.
Take the time to work with your SEO specialist to ensure a proper selection of terms to target. Your targeted keywords will need to be included in the page title, the meta description tag and in the heading elements and content of your site and will be the primary factor in determining your rankings in search engines.
An analysis needs to be performed of the competitiveness of your keywords against who is currently in the top ranked positions for those same terms in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). This will provide an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of your current and potential competitors which you may be able to exploit to your own success.
Meta Tags
Once you have developed a list of keywords to target, implement these in to your website HTML code. This is one of the most crucial areas of SEO that often get overlooked.
Page Title: (while technically not a meta tag) is the first thing that search engine bots look at when attempting to classify and index your site. It carries the most weight for SEO and must be relevant to the content of your page and site as well. A title tag should be no more than 165 characters, otherwise the extra text will be truncated and show as 3 dots (“…”).
Meta Description: This is the description that shows in the search results. Have a clearly worded tag line that states exactly who or what you are and what you are providing. The description must be less than 155 characters and should include your most important keywords that you are targeting.
Meta Keywords: While this tag is not considered crucial to SEO anymore, it is included for best practices. Do not use more than 8-10 keywords (300 characters) and make sure that the same words appear in the content of the page they are being used on.
Content
Google has always stated that content is paramount for rankings. The content of your site not only lets your viewers know what your site is about, but it is what the search engine bots use to classify your site. The newest algorithm update from Google means now more than ever, well written, original textual content is mandatory for all onsite and offsite web content. Failure to provide relevant content carries the risk of incurring ranking penalties from Google.
SEO Website Development Considerations (Page 1 of 2)
Google uses hundreds of different signals and criteria to rank your website. There are many overlooked SEO considerations that people often miss when designing a website. Work with an SEO expert to develop a cohesive optimization strategy before you begin any work on your site.
Keyword research
Good keyword research is essential to the success of a successful of any website marketing campaign. A descriptive, yet keyword rich domain name is imperative to your success. Choose keywords for your content that are relevant to your business or industry. You want to have terms that have a good search volume but are not too initially competitive.
It takes time and effort to go after high competition phrases. A good strategy is to have more immediate, attainable keyword goals and get ranking for those first. Continue to revisit your targeted keywords as markets and search patterns fluctuate often.
Take the time to work with your SEO specialist to ensure a proper selection of terms to target. Your targeted keywords will need to be included in the page title, the meta description tag and in the heading elements and content of your site and will be the primary factor in determining your rankings in search engines.
An analysis needs to be performed of the competitiveness of your keywords against who is currently in the top ranked positions for those same terms in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). This will provide an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of your current and potential competitors which you may be able to exploit to your own success.
Meta Tags
Once you have developed a list of keywords to target, implement these in to your website HTML code. This is one of the most crucial areas of SEO that often get overlooked.
Page Title: (while technically not a meta tag) is the first thing that search engine bots look at when attempting to classify and index your site. It carries the most weight for SEO and must be relevant to the content of your page and site as well. A title tag should be no more than 165 characters, otherwise the extra text will be truncated and show as 3 dots (“…”).
Meta Description: This is the description that shows in the search results. Have a clearly worded tag line that states exactly who or what you are and what you are providing. The description must be less than 155 characters and should include your most important keywords that you are targeting.
Meta Keywords: While this tag is not considered crucial to SEO anymore, it is included for best practices. Do not use more than 8-10 keywords (300 characters) and make sure that the same words appear in the content of the page they are being used on.
Content
Google has always stated that content is paramount for rankings. The content of your site not only lets your viewers know what your site is about, but it is what the search engine bots use to classify your site. The newest algorithm update from Google means now more than ever, well written, original textual content is mandatory for all onsite and offsite web content. Failure to provide relevant content carries the risk of incurring ranking penalties from Google.
How Website Redesign can Improve Search Results: Part 2
In the first of this article we discussed three factors that have to be given consideration during web redesign process. In todays article we will touch upon other factors too.
4) Download speed: A slow website can ruin user experience. A user is very much likely to exit a slow loading webpage rather than wait for it. Google has taken notice of it and in April 2010 strongly emphasized on reducing webpage download speeds.
Google went to the extent of saying that webpage speed will be factored in their search engine algorithm. If your website downloads very slowly then check thoroughly the root causes. Is it a Flash banner or a heavy image? Many times inefficient programming or bloated code can also affect speed.
Thus a slow loading page can harm you in 2 ways: One, a user will not wait for the page to download and move away to a site which is faster. Secondly, Google may penalize your website and your search engine rankings may drop across all keywords.
5) Sitemaps: Many webmasters may think it as an unnecessary exercise but the fact is that search engines take it very seriously. Both, HTML version and XML version of sitemap are crucial. While the HTML version helps users in navigating the site, the XML version helps in getting all pages of a site indexed by search engines.
The HTML sitemap should ideally be accessible form the home page of the website. XML sitemap should be submitted to search engines for quicker indexing. The bigger the site, the more advantageous and important a sitemap is from SEO point of view.
6) Page Title: How many we have seen titles such “Home Page”. Such titles do great harm to a site. Such uninformative title tells a search engine nothing about the page. A vital clue that a search engine and user can benefit from is wasted.
Rarely will you ever see a webpage opaque or uninformative titles doing well in search engine rankings. Always, add titles relevant to the page name and content.
7) Content Optimization: Good content is not enough. Proper use of H1, H2,H3 and links is very vital.
Headings and strong tags signal to bots on which text is important. Always use keywords or key phrases within these tags.
Internal links are another factor. Web pages should be interlinked to increase usability of a website. Links should be optimized by using keywords and key phrases.
8) Images: Images need to be lightweight. Heavy images can drastically increase page download time. Image names should have keywords related to the page name. If the page is about Ferrari cars then the images used should have Ferrari as keyword.
Never forget to add Alt attribute. It should be a short yet keyword rich sentence.
9) Custom error pages: Many websites lose a chunk of visitors due to improper error handling pages. A custom error page can help a user navigate the site even if s/he encounters page not found error.