Optimize Your Website for Search Engines

So how can you optimize your website to get to the top of the search engines result pages?

It doesn’t take long for web site owners to figure out how incredibly valuable that high rankings in the search engines can be to the success of their businesses. High, long-term search engine rankings can literally mean the difference between enormous success and dismal failure for many small businesses online.

There’s a ton of free information available online about search engine optimization, also known as SEO. In this article, we provide some basic information and some simple tips and advice that new site owners can begin using right away to optimize their websites. The tips and advice that we’re offering below are just the basics of search engine optimization but are extremely important to get the best rankings possible.

Your ability to rank in the search engines will depend upon your ability to optimize your website but will also largely depend on how competitive the industry or market segment is that you’re competing in. A highly competitive market will require the same SEO principles but may also require a much longer time line to see results from your efforts. So, if you’re competing in a competitive market, try to keep your short-term ranking expectations in-check. Ranking in a competitive market takes time, and in some cases, a very long time (years.)

But before you do anything else, you should start with the SEO basics outlined below:

Don’t Believe the Hype of Guaranteed Rankings

If you’ve spent anytime online, you’ve probably received more than one promotional email promising “1st Page Search Results on Google Guaranteed!” and others that claim similar results in the search engines. Guaranteeing placement on search engine results pages (SERPS) is virtually impossible, but many shady SEO companies prey on eager web site publishers by promising these ranking outcomes. Search engine optimization is a high stakes game for most site owners so the appeal of getting top rankings is easy to see, so understandably, many site owners eagerly jump at opportunities to quickly rank in the search engines. First, the only guarantee that is possible with respect to search engine rankings is that rankings will change – for better or for worse.

Not all SEO consultants out there are shady scam artists, however. There are a number of SEO consultants and SEO companies in the marketplace that are very reputable and highly effective. However, anyone promising “guaranteed top results” or “permanent top positions” is most likely untrustworthy. Guaranteeing outcome in search results is the first sign of a shady SEO because there is simply no way anyone can guarantee that your site will rank number one for anything.

Adhere to Best Practices in Web Standards

There are a few things that you yourself can do immediately to impact your search engine visibility and rankings. Some of the most important factors that will impact your rankings have to do with so-called web standards “best practices” which include the following:

• Accessibility
• Usability
• Clean Markup

Accessibility refers to making your website accessible to all Internet users, including both disabled and non-disabled users, regardless of what browsing technology or browser version they might be using. Making your site more accessible to the disabled, such as the vision-impaired, will also help search engine spiders to index your site’s content. Second, usability refers to how easy it is for your site’s users to navigate and find what they’re looking for on your website. And finally, clean markup refers to the nature of the source code on your website. The markup, as web site source code is sometimes referred to, or source code that is clean makes it easy for search engines to index appropriately. Validate your HTML and be sure to use markup that is as “lean and clean” as possible. Use proper headings, paragraphs, and lists, and avoid using presentational markup or anything that else that might interfere with search engine spiders.

Adhering to web standards best practices unquestionably helps improve your visitors’ experience by making your site more accessible and usable for humans, but it also makes the site more attractive to search engine robots. So, make your site highly accessible, very easy to use and written with clean and lean HTML and the search engines will love you!

No Shortcuts, Tips or Tricks

One of the most important things that you’ll need to learn about getting results with the search engines is that there are no special shortcuts, techniques, tips or tricks that will magically make you appear in the first position on search results pages.  There is simply no easy, quick, simple way to get great results.

SEO is just plain grunt work; it’s hard, it’s unglamorous and it takes considerable time, energy, and effort to make it happen.  Results will not come overnight and above all, you must be patient with your efforts.  Do not try to cut any corners or fast track your optimization efforts with the latest SEO “trick”.

If you want results that will have legs over the long haul, you must be willing to do the work and, above all, you must be patient.

Establish Yourself with Authoritative Content

The single most important element of any web site is the nature of its content. Establishing yourself with authoritative content on your chosen subject matter is the single most important element for long term ranking success. All things being equal, the best, most authoritative content on any subject will enjoy a distinct advantage over competing web sites on a number of different levels. First and foremost, writing authoritative content will help establish and build your authority on the subject matter with your users. Secondly, authoritative content will bring return visitors back to your site and return visitors are more likely to link back to your site. Additionally, authoritative content has a better chance of getting inbound links from other highly ranked authoritative web sites, which is one of the most important factors in search engine rankings.

Forget about just writing “good” content. Good content just won’t be good enough especially if you’re talking about highly competitive markets. Give yourself an edge by trying to build your authority with authoritative content. If not authoritative, at the very least, your content needs to be useful to the people you want to find your site.

Add Fresh, New Content Consistently

Closely related to authoritative content is fresh content. By adding fresh, new content regularly, you give visitors a reason to come back.

Stay committed to adding new content to your site. Adding new content to your web site with articles or blog posts gives both your visitors as well as the search engine robots a reason to come back to your site more often. Search engine robots just love new content and will visit your site more often once they notice that you update regularly with fresh content.

Some site owners might find it difficult to consistently add fresh content to their sites because of the subject matter or the logistics involved with producing the content, but making an effort will give you an edge, particularly if you’re competing in a market segment that doesn’t typically provide regular, fresh sources of content as a whole.

Stay committed to generating fresh content for your website and it will pay off in the long run.

Use Proper Grammar and Spelling

To begin with, you should use proper grammar and spelling because your users deserve to be treated with respect. Poor grammar and spelling is insulting and disrespectful to your users and can severely damage your credibility when trying to sell a product or a service. It can also impair your ability to build your authority on your subject matter. So, don’t be an idiot – spell check your articles, documents and blog posts before posting them online.

Additionally, there’s some speculation that search engines, Google in particular, might also consider the grammar and spelling mistakes on your web pages. The idea behind this concept is simple and logical: fewer spelling and grammar mistakes on a document = a higher quality document. Google just might prefer web pages with clear text, few errors and a good writing style.

So, all things being equal, better writing quality for Google equates to a higher quality document, which results in higher rankings for a document on a relative basis.

Write Descriptive and Unique Page Titles

Make your page titles simple, unique, and relevant for each web page. Writing descriptive and unique page titles makes it easier for search engines to know what each page is about, and makes it easier for people scanning search results to quickly determine whether your document is relevant to their search. Page titles are also used to link to your site from search results pages. Because of these factors, the title tags on your web pages are one of the most important elements on any web page for search engine optimization purposes.

Some SEO consultants would argue that title tags are the most important element so make sure that you pay close attention to the title tags on your web pages.

Here are a few suggestions for the word order of the text in your title tags. If you have a large site with numerous categories and pages, we suggest the following:
Document Title | Category or Section Name | Site or Company Name

If you have a small site with just a few pages, you can use this word order instead:
Document Title | Site or Company Name

Start the title tag element with the most prominent or important keyword for that particular page. Make sure that you accurately and succinctly describe the contents of the page with each title tag and don’t overstuff or cram it with too many words.

Above all, do not use the same title text for all of your web pages. Doing so makes it more difficult for search engines to rank your site, more difficult for people browsing through search results, and ultimately, it makes it much harder for your site’s visitors to quickly find out what your web pages are all about.

Use Proper Heading Tags

Make sure to use the h1 – h6 headings tags properly on your pages.

First, be sure that you use text inside of your headings tags as search engines aren’t going to pay much attention to images or Javascript inserted into your headings, even if they are properly attributed with ALT tags (more on ALT tags later). The bottom line is that you need to use text inside of your headings tags.
Second, make sure to order your headings properly: the h1 tag should be the first tag ordered on the page, the h2 tag should be second on the page, the h3 tag should be ordered third, so on and so forth. Do not put an h4 heading tag between your h1 and h2 tags.

Incorrect header order might seem harmless, but proper order of headings on your pages is important as far as the search engines and your rankings are concerned.

Use Search Engine Friendly URLs

Dynamically generated URLs containing multiple identifying characters (such as “&” or “?”) in a query string can be problematic for search engine robots. Too many of these identifying characters in a query string can even prevent the search engines from crawling a huge swath of your pages. Additionally, the indexing rate of dynamically generated pages is much slower compared to static page URLs.

Use search engine friendly URLs instead that are readable by human eyes. When it comes to URLs in general, shorter is better than longer URL’s. Using search engine friendly URLs will help both your users as well as your search engine rankings as dramatic improvements are possible from just changing the URL naming structure of a site.

For example, instead of using this URL:
www.doggytreats/product/details.php?type=234&id=31

Try using this one:
www.doggytreats/product/beef-bone-chew-toy.html

Static URL’s are much more user friendly to your end users. While modifying and rewriting a site’s URLs can be a little tricky, it’s well worth the effort.

Search Friendly URL Resources:

• Making Dynamic URLs Search Engine Friendly
• mod_rewrite – Beginner’s Guide

Commit to Acquiring Inbound Links (Slowly)

There is no easy way to build inbound links to your website but the fact is that incoming links are immensely important for SEO. Some would argue that links carry far too much weight in the ranking process. Measuring the quantity, and in particular, the quality of inbound links though is probably the most democratic way to measure the strength and authority of any web site.

Typically, only the most authoritative web sites on a given subject will get links from other highly trusted, authoritative websites. Getting links from other authoritative websites really depends upon the quality of your content, plain and simple. Quality, however, is a completely subjective measure and there are several ways to measure the quality of a document on the Web that most people would not anticipate.

Quality sources of information tend to be very attractive “link bait” for websites looking to build authority in their respective business categories. A web document can be considered high quality with any of the following attributes:

• Comprehensive
• Unique Perspective / Alternative Viewpoint
• Viral in Nature
• High Level of Authority

Any web page that is comprehensive, unique, viral or highly authoritative could be considered a high quality web page. With Google, the quality or importance of any web page is measured in part by the importance of the links from other sites pointing to that specific page. So, the quality of inbound links on high quality web pages is far more important than the total quantity of links.

That being said, you should try to commit to acquiring and building links to your web site by creating high quality content that other authoritative publishers will want to link to. Trying to obtain one high quality link per month from an authoritative site in your category is a goal that you should be able to achieve with some modest effort.

Meta Tag Myths

Meta tags, and in particular, the meta keywords tag, have been abused so much by spammers that search engines don’t use them in their ranking formula. There are still some myths surrounding the use of meta tags. Most SEO consultants might even tell you to ignore the use of the meta keywords tag entirely. The meta description tag is still somewhat important because some search engines still use the meta description data to describe pages in search results. While the use of the meta keyword tags won’t improve your rankings, there is some downside risk of not using it at all. Not using it might hurt your rankings slightly, especially if your competitors are all using the tag and you aren’t. You should employ every SEO element possible, however slight the advantage might be.

Do not overstuff the meta keywords tag and, above all, make sure that any keyword that you put into the meta keyword tag is readable on the page. Putting a keyword in the meta tag not contained on the page can be seen as spamming by the search engines.

All that being said, don’t waste too much time fretting over meta tags in general.

Submit to Site Directories Sparingly

Often slightly overrated, submitting a site to directories and search engines can be useful, especially if the site is new. Go ahead and submit it to the 3 major search engines – once. It can help start the indexing process for a new site, it definitely won’t hurt, but more than likely, the search engines will find you anyway.

Here’s a list of the free URL submission pages for the 3 major search engines:

• Google Submit URL
• MSN Submit URL
• Yahoo! Submit URL

Two directories that may be worth submitting to as well are the Yahoo! Directory and the DMOZ Open Directory Project.

Be patient when submitting your site – it can take as long as 12 weeks to get your site reviewed and listed (DMOZ) unless you pay them upfront to list you (Yahoo Directory.)

Search Engines are Smarter than You

Search engines are incredibly adept at picking up spam. While not entirely full proof, search engines make it their business to ferret out the use of spamming methods such as cloaking, link farms, keyword stuffing, hidden text, doorway pages, alt text spamming and many other dubious methods.

Some of these methods may work temporarily, but nowadays, spamming is increasingly a short-lived activity. The risk of utilizing some of these methods is a significant penalty and even getting banned from the search engines entirely.

Search engine companies have a seemingly infinite pool of economic and human resources at their disposal to catch and de-list spammers. Don’t think that you can outsmart, out think or outmaneuver companies like Google or Microsoft who have research budgets in the hundreds of millions and thousands of PhD’s in computer science at their beck and call. Don’t be a fool to think you can outwit them for any length of time. Just don’t do it.

Search engines need their results to be relevant and accurate and they come down hard on people who try to game their systems.

If you can live with the consequences of getting banned from a search engine, go right ahead, but if risking your entire livelihood sounds idiotic (like it does to us), then stay away from these techniques.

Once again, our advice about spamming or attempting to spam the search engines is this: don’t do it.

Additional SEO Resources

If you’re looking for more great information on the subject of SEO, here are a few more outstanding resources on the subject:

• SEO Book – one of the top SEO resource sites on the Web, Aaron Wall’s renowned SEO Book has provided guidance and training for well over 1,000 webmasters.
• Search Engine Visibility – written by Shari Thurow, this book is a great primer on search engine visibility and optimization.
• Search Engine Optimization All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies – from Bruce Clay, SEO consultant and author, this is an outstanding, comprehensive reference book for virtually all of your SEO needs.

The outline above were simply the basic guidelines for SEO. There is much more than this that can be done to increase your site’s visibility in search engines, but following the guidelines and advice provided here are an excellent starting point for your optimization efforts.

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Tagged as: accessibility, authoritative content, building links, clean markup, inbound links, meta tag, search engine optimization, SERPS, Usability