As I’m on holiday this week, tripping around Europe,
I’ve little time to be writing blog articles. But fear not! Jerry Low has
kindly stepped in to supply his top 10 SEO elements that all websites should
have. Enjoy!
Seriously, you don’t need an expert to optimize your website for better search
engine rankings. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), after all, is not rocket
science. It is something you can learn and do it yourself – all it takes is
some serious readings and hard work.
However, there is something we need to know before we start any real SEO work –
the direction of our entire SEO campaign – What we are trying to achieve? What
are our targeted keywords? Who are our competitors? That led us to the most
important preparation work before any SEO campaign get started - keyword
research.
Keyword research is crucial as it acts like a compass for your website or blog.
A proper keyword research reveals the supply and demand trends in your
industries thus giving general idea on which keyword you should focus on.
In brief, here is how you can do a keyword research:
* Get a list of related keywords using Google Keyword Tool
* Search each keyword to check how many websites turned out on the search
engine result page (SERP) – this fits in as the number of supplies.
* Websites topping the SERP are your major competitors, study them well.
* To learn what are the demands, check number of searches for each keyword using
keyword tools.
* Tool suggestion for keyword research: Word Tracker and Keyword Discovery –
these two are my favourites.
Well, now you have a rough idea on your competition. The smart approach is to
be a big fish in a small/average pond – for starters, you should focus your
work on keywords with moderate demands and low competition.
Besides supply and demand, keyword research also offers valuable information
for your web designs. Take example that you are selling shoes online, I am sure
you’ll have questions like: What are the popular brands searched online? How
shoes should be categorized – based on brand, occasion, or sizes?
All these can be answered as you run down the keyword research work. You’ll see
searches come in based on brands, like ‘DC shoes’, ‘jordan shoes’, ‘nike
shoes’; in the same time, searchers are also looking for shoes for different
activities or occasions, like ‘ballet shoes’, ‘safety shoes’, ‘bowling shoes’,
‘prom shoes’, and so on.
By the end of your research work, you should be able to generate a list of
target keywords. And now it’s the time to focus your SEO work on them. To get
started, here are the 10 key elements that will improve your blog or website’s
SEO quality immediately. 10 key elements that improve your website SEO quality
immediately:
1. Index-able and Keyword-rich URL
The power of a keyword rich URL is often overlooked by bloggers and webmasters.
In case you have yet to registered your domain name, try include your primary
keywords in your domain; while for those who are already running a website, a
keyword rich URL (example: abc.com/keyword) still helps a lot. One might
complains that domain name with keywords faces branding problems and hard to be
remembered; but that’s the dilemma every webmaster/blogger has to face.
Also, a good SEO practice is to avoid complicated dynamic URL that is hard to
be indexed. Try limit your URL to 2 – 3 variables, excessive usage of ?, $,
&, +, % characters as well as cgi-bin redirect will only do you harm.
2. A reliable web hosting
Website with poor uptime will never rank high on search engines. Let’s imagine
that you are the search engine, how would ranking a down website on top of your
search result page looks like? Awfully bad, don’t you think? Hence, hosting
your website on a reliable web hosts - dedicated or shared, is very crucial.
To pick up the right web host, you can always hang around reputable hosting
forums like WebHostingTalk.com or you can read my personal hosting reviews
here.
3. Keyword-rich title and heading tags
A keyword-rich page title is as crucial as a keyword-rich URL for a few
reasons.
One, a keyword-rich title tells the search engine bots what the page is about
thus grouping your webpage into the right category; second, most search engines
will bold your keywords in title whenever that particular keyword is searched.
Common sense, the bolding effect will definitely draw extra attention from the
searchers and thus, brings more clicks into your website/blog.
Heading tags (example
)
is hard to be missed in old times. Not now anymore. As more and more websites
are built solely on blogging software like Typepad and WordPress, heading tags
are often put in the wrong use.
Take Wordpress (WP) templates for example, WP themes designers often use
heading tags for sidebar titles without relevant keywords (example: Achieve,
Categories) which bring no SEO value at all. To make sure your blog is well
SEO-ed, one top thing to do is to remove or modify these headings into
keyword-rich headings.
4. Alt tag on images
In term of SEO, putting descriptive alt attributes with your image places
additional relevant text to your source code. Search engines like this and the
more relevant text you have the better chances you get to rank higher.
As an additional benefit, a descriptive image alt tag helps users to understand
your image when it fails to load.
5. Proper structured internal linking
Search engines pay a lot of attention to links – both internal and external. As
internal links are those that can be controlled by you, make sure your website
internal linking is proper structured and filled with relevant descriptive
keywords. A plain anchor text like ‘click here’ and ‘read more’ are not clever;
‘click here for more Jordan shoes’ and ‘read more about ballet shoes’ are.
For website owners, make sure there are plenty enough of internal links
pointing to your primary pages; for bloggers, mentioned and linked to your
previous blogpost whenever it’s appropriate, this give extra link juice to your
previous blogpost (hence better rankings) plus it enables your readers to catch
up what they missed.
6. Inbound links
Link development is an inevitable process if you want your website to rank
high. The keypoint, however, is not to obtain links blindly from spammy
websites and directories. Always emphasize quality on top of quantity when
you’re building links.
There are wide options for your link building campaign: from submitting your
sites to reputable directories to asking for a link exchange; from buying text
link ads to writing guest blog post in your industries – some of these methods
can be risky (of search engine’s filter and bans) and some are not. What you
need to do is to pick a series of method you feel comfortable with and pour
some sweat in the link building campaign.
7. XML sitemap
XML sitemaps is used for search engine bots indexing. It runs as a list of all
pages and posts along with related information like priority of each page and
the date of creation. These elements help search engine bots to crawl your
websites/blogs as well as learning the importance level of each page.
While XML sitemap is not a must for a website to rank high, it is however good
practice for web and blog owners to have it on site.
8. WWW/non-WWW Canonical Issue
Originally, all websites built can be viewed in two versions: the WWW and the
non-WWW version. In normal cases, the search engines should be able to
recognize the issue and rank the websites accordingly but occasionally it
fails. This led to serious problem where websites are penalized (especially on
Google) due to content duplication. Even if there’s no penalty imposed, the web
page indexed twice will have hard time to rank high as the back links are
(PR/anchor text) shared over two web pages.
The solution of this problem is simple. One, you can login to Google Webmaster
Tools and tell them which version (WWW or non-WWW) of the website is preferred.
Alternatively, a simple 301 redirect code in your .htaccess file is sufficient
to solve the problem.
Example code:
To have your website in WWW version
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com $
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
To have your website in non-WWW version
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^ example\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http:// example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
9. Robots.txt
Robots.txt simply tells search engine bots what to crawl and what not to. It
might not help that much in website rankings but it prevents irrelevant objects
to be related to your website – which is good for your website to look focus
(in search engine eyes) and professional.
10. Content is king
Users do not search for fun, they search for information and solution to a
problem. If your website or blog does not offer what the users really want, they will
move away. As what had been widely covered by Nathan’s post about increasing
and maitaining blog traffics, you should know attracting traffics via SEO is
just the beginning; the key point of having a successful website is always
having an informative website that solves human’s needs.
About the author
Jerry Low is the guy behind Web Hosting Secret Revealed. He offers unbiased
hosting reviews to help make your decision easier. In case you are looking for
a web host, why not start reading his recommendations – Hostgator now?
Source by Jerry Low
