Website optimization refers to optimizing your website so that when search engines send their robot “spiders” your site gets indexed and ranked correctly.
Here is a quick checklist to optimize your website:
1. Keyword-rich Page Content
After choosing the keyword terms you want surfers to find you with, create 450 word web-page for every keyword phrase and try to use “original” content that is not found anywhere else on the internet.
Include keyword phrase in the first fifty words as this is where search engines look for subject matter and ensure a good keyword density of between 1.5% and 2% throughout for a high ranking keyword.
2. Keyword-rich Page Titles
This means using the keyword term you want surfers to find you with as part of your page title. Try to minimise use of redundant words like “the”, “and” etc and still maintain readability. You should also keep in mind this page title will show up first when your page gets served up by the search engines so make it enticing for the searchers to click to find out more. You can use five to eight words or 100 letters but note only the first 60 letters appear in most search engine results.
3. Use Meta Descriptions
The Meta tag should be a keyword-rich description of the web page. Do not include any new keywords not found in the web page. Most search engines also serve up the met description in search results so it should include terms to induce searchers to seek more details by clicking to your website. You should try and limit to 255 characters including spaces and note only the first 160 appear in SERPS of most search engines.
4. Use Keywords in (H1, H2, H3) Headers
You should ensure keyword phrases appear in any headlines and sub-headers as they are given more importance by search engines.
5. Use descriptions in ALT Attribute of Image Descriptions
The ALT attributes not only help your images to rank in image search but also helps visually- impaired searchers in accordance with web accessibility initiative.
6. Hyperlink Strategy
You should use a keyword of the page you are linking to so as to give the search engine another clue as to what your article is about and link to many pages on your site. You should however try not to link out with your exact keyword phrase as this could dilute your page in favor of theirs.
7. Make Navigation System Search Friendly
Some content management systems (CMS) and ecommerce solutions create pages with long ugly urls marked with question marks and a string of numbers making it harder for crawling and indexing. There are many options of making pretty urls which tell the robots exactly what the page is about.
8. Make a Site Map & Robots.txt file
If you have a large website then a Site Map page with links to all pages will not only make search engines job easier but can also help surfers navigate your site. A robot.txt file will inform search spiders the part of your website you don’t want indexing. Also register with Google Webmaster Central to set up the sitemapping, geographic target, analytics, etc.
Website Optimization Service
If you would like a website audit and suggestions of how to improve your site for rankings please contact us through the SEO Consultant page.
