Tips for Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an initial and ongoing process that involves tweaking various aspects of your website. It deals only with organic search results (not paid positions). How sites are ranked by Google, Yahoo, and other engines involves elaborate, independent, and constantly-evolving algorithms. Murray has put together ‘best-in-class’ suggestions that can work (this month ;) to improve your positioning in organic search results. Keep in mind, how frequently your site is ‘refreshed’ by engines is affected by the number of pages your site has, your site traffic, referrers to your site, and frequency of content updates.

Alt Tags
Images can’t be read by a spider unless labeled with ‘alt tags’ that are representative of the content of the image as well as the corresponding keyword(s).

Anchor Links
Anchor links helps users to navigate between pages and helps the spiders track a content thread.

Content and Descriptor Tags (i.e.: bold)
The content of your webpage needs to contain primary keywords of density between 2.3-3.5%. Many sites push this envelope, and some have demonstrated the value of loading keywords. However, you want content to be reader-friendly and not repetitive.

Heading Tags
Heading tags are designated in the code to represent the content headlines and subheads on a page. Heading tags rank in order – h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 and h6. These tags should only be used as appropriate.

Meta Description
The Meta description (part of the unseen HTML) gives a brief description of the page content. An expert copywriter should minimize this description to less than 160 characters including keywords and relevant content from the visible page.

Meta Keywords
Meta keywords (part of the unseen HTML) should relate to content on the page and ‘bubble to the surface’ those words that people might use to search for your offering on that particular page. Keywords should be coordinated with the Meta Description.

Page Redirects
Page redirects for outdated, renamed or retired pages of a Website prevent broken links to already indexed pages. Also prevents broken browser bookmarks.

Page Title
Page title or ‘title tag’ of each page should be unique. This tag is cross referenced by search engines against other descriptions on the page and behind the scenes. It should be short and concise to tell visitors what that particular page is about.

Robots.txt
A robots.txt file is used to stop a page or folder or entire site from being indexed by spiders.

Sitemap
Use of HTML and XML sitemaps help spiders to easily crawl and index your website.

URL Structure
Many Content Management Systems (CMS) automatically generate dynamic URL strings with random alpha-numeric sequences. For pages you want ranked by search engines, it’s important to create a friendly URL structure using appropriate filenames and folder directory on your Website.

Website Navigation
Our first real question of possible visual compromise… the most SEO-friendly navigation structure is created from descriptive ‘live text’ that helps search engines index pages. Most drop-down menus and Flash-based menus are not necessarily indexed.

Website Promotion
Driving traffic to your site with keyword links from other sites is an essential part of organic SEO. The volume of traffic and credibility of the site generating the traffic ‘counts’ toward the validity and ranking importance of your content.