This is the sixth in a series of articles by J Keightley who is a professional life coaching specialist and ecommerce business owner of Giggleberries Mens Underwear, which investigates some of the important things to do from an SEO point of view.
So, we understand the difference between SEO and internet marketing and that SEO needs to be thought about right from the start of your website being built.
Here are some of the concepts that you need to consider;
URL’s – this is your domain name and whilst it only has limited use it always helps to have your keywords in your URL, but it is not that significant that you need to worry about changing your URL if it does not have your keywords in it. However, you can still use keyword for the subpages and have the keywords appear at the end of your domain name, such as www.mydomain.com/keyword1/keyword2
Age – Google also likes older domain names, so it is worth registering your domain name for as long as possible. This makes google think that you are serious about your business and plan on being around for a while.
Meta Tags – these are tags that turn up in the source code of your pages and your web master should know all about them. The main ones are meta title, meta keywords and meta description. Google ignores the meta keyword tag, so don’t worry about that. However, it is important to ensure your meta title and description contain your keywords. For example, if your website is called ‘A Place For Pets’ and you sell pet products then you want to make sure your meta title is something along the lines of ‘dog leads’. It is also important to ensure you include your keywords in your meta description and ensure that those same words show up on the page on your site.
Pictures – have as few pictures on your site as possible as google can not read pictures. If your website banner on your home page has your website name and keywords on it, then google will not be able to see this because it is an image. Your keywords need to appear as text. If you do have images then you need to make sure that these have alt tags which contain your keywords. Alt tags are what appear on the screen when you hover your mouse pointer over an image, causing a little box to appear describing what the image is. This is also an important part of ensuring your website is user friendly to people with disabilities that rely on assistive technology to read your web pages. Actually, if you provide any service you are required by law to make it accessible to people with disabilities.
Pictures again – also ensure that the name you use to save your picture contains your keywords as google can see the file extensions, so save them as ‘keyword.jpg’
Navigation – your website needs to be clear to navigate, because if a person can navigate your website easily then so can the search engines.
Content – content is king and you need to make sure that your text content is about 5% rich with your keywords. Include your keywords as near to the top of the page and at the start of sentences. Then include keywords in the body of the text and finally towards the end to achieve what is called ‘prominence and consistency’
Formatting – use different formats to highlight your keywords, such as bold, italic, underline and bullet points. This advocates to google that the words are of importance and relate to what the site is about.
Site Maps – site maps are usually xml files and you need to ensure that the xml site map for your web site is uploaded to your Google Webmaster Central account. This ensures that your site is indexed quickly with google.
Div Tags – you will observe that when you view the source code of your pages that it contains lots of <div> tags. You need to ensure that all of those that contain your key words appear as far up the source page as possible so that google sees them as early as possible.
Site Structure – google likes sites that have lots of pages, the more the better. However, it is also important to ensure that the structure of your site is as flat as possible so that the page rang value of your home page does not get diluted down. The reason for this is the sub-pages that sit below your home page get a certain amount of the page rank of your home page attributed to them. If a sub page has another page below it, then it then gets a bit of the page rank of the page above it, which got a fraction of the page rank from the home page. Therefore, it is best to keep your site broad and flat.
Find out how you can make more money with Google adsense program - read these making money with adsense tips.
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