seo friendly website

SEO is not brain surgery and honestly anybody can do it if they really understand the basics of creating a highly optimized search engine friendly website.

Three key factors:

1. Create content the search engines can spider and index easily
2. Link your site intelligently so the PageRank flows correctly and is channeled to your most relevant and important pages.
3. Placing your most important keywords in the proper areas on your page for optimal positioning.

Some sites get one or two of these correct, but it’s rare to see the site which has mastered all three. And that’s good news for you, because if you fully understand the art of creating a search engine friendly site then you’ve got a huge advantage over your competition. It’s time to make search engine spiders your friend.

Let’s start with a good “crawl” environment for the spiders so they will be your allies not foes.  A good crawling environment is just a fancy way of describing how easy it is for search engine spiders to download your pages, easily access your content, and find the rest of your pages based on how you’ve linked your site together.

Most sites to put up roadblocks that stop these spiders in their tracks, shutting them out of important areas of a site. Put up a spider speed bump and you might see your page drop like a rock, completely out of the top rankings.

You want spiders to eagerly gobble up your pages and return to dine often, vigorously crawling all the corners of your site to make sure your pages get indexed and, just as important, stay indexed and well-ranked in the engines.

So start with the following:

• Use HTML for content. If you want search engines to index your content, design it in simple HTML text format. Creating content in Flash, AJAX, JavaScript, frames, or other formats will make it harder for search engines to index your content.

• Use HTML for links. If you want search engines to follow your inbound links, use the simple HTML format. Just as with your page content, you should avoid using links in Flash or JavaScript format. And, if you must use Flash or Javascript, then you should also employ the use of alternative links in simple HTML format that is rich in keyword anchor text.

• Make the most of Sitemaps. Employ both a regular HTML Sitemap and an XML Sitemap for best results. Remember that these files need to be kept up to date so you are accurately listing the files you want indexed.
• Use your robots.txt file or the meta no-index tag to prevent search engines from wasting time indexing unnecessary pages. There is typically a limit to how many pages each engine will index on your site, make certain you get the ones that are most important to your site in the index and block the ones that aren’t important.
• Fix your broken links. Use your Google Webmaster Central (you better have signed up for one already by now) to ensure your site has no broken internal links that search engines won’t be able to crawl.
• Don’t require form submission. Yes, Google’s spider does fill out forms (somewhat) but as a rule of thumb assume spiders don’t fill out forms or click submit buttons, so don’t require them in order to reach pages you want indexed. If you have content behind forms that needs to be indexed, be sure to provide an alternative link for the spiders to crawl.
• Don’t require registration, cookies, or search. Spiders can’t fill out registration forms. Same with cookies—search engine spiders don’t accept them. And don’t make spiders use your site search engine to find your site’s content either.
• Don’t serve up meaningless URLs. Be careful with session IDs, calendar links, or other technologies that generate large numbers of useless and possibly duplicate pages. You risk making it possible for spiders to get a different URL for the same page every time they access your site (such as with session IDs) or to encounter an endless number of links (such as a calendar program which links to a page for every possible future date).

If this happens, then spiders are going to spend too much time indexing useless pages on your site and not enough time indexing your important pages. It can also depress the overall PageRank available to your important pages by spreading it out over vast numbers of pages that don’t need to be indexed.

• Avoid long and complicated dynamic URLs. You know, the ones with lots of?’s, &’s and =’s. From both a search engine and a user perspective, short and descriptive URLs are ideal. A user should be able to tell what your page is about by reading the URL the search engine has displays for your page’s listing. And, in general, subdirectories are better than subdomains.
• Frames are bad. Don’t use ‘em.
• Avoid having excessive duplicate content on each page. If you have a retail site it is great to have pages about products but you do not need a page for every color of the product you offer particularly if each page is identical in content except for the color . One page is fine.

Now that we’ve covered how to get and keep your content indexed by the search spiders, let’s look at the way those spiders are directed around your site. Based on its internal linking, every site sends a message to search engines about what pages are the most important.

Are you sending search engines the right message? In other words, are you telling them your About Us page is just as important as your top money page or lead generation page? Let’s certainly hope not!

Site architecture: Put the focus where it needs to be.

• Match your keywords to your site. This means using both free and paid keyword tools to find the right keywords to target, as well as keyword brainstorming and feedback from your customers like your web analytics.
• Then organize those keywords into related groups. If you run a golf site, organize your keywords into a group of golf keywords, a group of driver keywords, a group of golf ball keywords, and so on.

Each keyword group then becomes its own category on your site:

http://www.franksgolfworld.com/drivers/

http://www.franksgolfworld/golfballs/

http://www.franksgolfworld.com/irons/

• Use your homepage to link to the main page within each category. Within those categories, you then develop your individual pages designed to rank for the various keywords in that group such as Taylor Made drivers or Titleist VX1 golf balls. Ideally, pages within each category will link primarily just to other pages within their category—and tend not to link to pages in other categories.

This keeps each category tightly focused primarily on its core keyword group and makes it much easier for search engines to identify which keywords your pages should rank for.

• Reinforce your important pages. Make sure every page in each category links back to its main category page and to the overall site’s homepage. Strengthen the rankings of your most important pages by linking to them from within each group as well; using the keyword anchor text you want the linked-to pages to rank for.
• Be consistent in how you link your pages together. Always use the same URL format when linking to your own pages. No http://franksgolfword.com/taylor_made_drivers.html” one time and http://www.franksgolfword.com/taylor_made_drivers.html the other
• Create a flat site architecture. How you structure your directory is not especially important—how you structure your internal linking is what we are after!

Clearly, the goal the goal here is to have the most important pages you want to get ranked like product pages, article content pages, and others such as your About Us page, Privacy Policy, etc. you don’t.  Focus Grasshopper!

It is not typical for search engines to keep all your pages in the index and your best case scenario is to have two pages rank in the top 10 especially on larger web sites. Search Engines will attempt to learn what pages are most important by links and keep those pages they believe to have the most value and will keep those in their index.

On a larger site it is very likely the engines will index pages you really don’t want indexed, and not index pages the ones you do.. This may require that you block access using a robots.txt file on some sections of your site so that you can get more of your important pages indexed and get the bang for the buck!

Besides internal linking to promote your most important pages and strengthen your site’s “theme”, you also want to place your targeted keywords on those pages in strategic areas to increase their chances of ranking well. That’s where on-page SEO comes in.

The “art”, not “science” of of on-page SEO is about:

• Each page being tailored to a specific keyword phrase. Using modifiers, synonyms, related keywords and long-tail secondary keywords is fine and encouraged, but you should always have a primary keyword or keyword phrase in mind for each page you’re optimizing. I like one to two tops and if you rank for more then it is a bonus!
• Avoid optimizing more than one page for the same keywords This just confuses search engines as to which page on your site they should rank for that keyword and spoils the site’s “theme”.
• Give each page a unique title tag, and make sure that your keyword appears in the title tag of that page. The ideal title tag is both keyword-rich and enticing. The reason you need an enticing title is simple. Studies have shown that by having a more enticing title will receive more clicks while ranking lower.  Title tags are your most important on-page element, so be sure to get them right.
• If you sell or service a local market, make sure to include geographic keywords. Local Search is red hot right now and getting hotter with the newer smart phones in use. Make sure you cover your local keywords in your title and body text if you want to show up well in Local Search Results.
• Keep your titles below 65 characters in length. This is the maximum to use if you want to make sure the complete title gets displayed in the search results on all the major engines. While it’s true that character length is not a ranking factor, it’s also true that nobody likes incomplete things. You would not talk to people in incomplete sentences right? So why do it to people you might not ever talk to but want to communicate with. .
• Give each page a unique meta description tag. Since meta descriptions are not a critical ranking factor, keyword placement is not as important. However, a well-written and customer-oriented description meta tag can greatly increase the number of clicks you get on your listing in the search results.

Also, search engines will bold the keywords in your description tag that match those used in the searcher’s query, automatically drawing the searcher’s eye to them and increasing clicks. So be sure to include your keywords in your description (even if they don’t impact rankings). And stick to 160 characters or less to avoid having your descriptions chopped off.

• Don’t waste your time with keywords meta tags. Simply put—they do nothing and search engines have officially stated that they no longer use them.
• Use NOODP and NOYDIR. If you’re listed in DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory, using the NOODP and NOYDIR meta tags will keep Google, Yahoo and Bing from messing up your carefully optimized titles and descriptions and replacing them with your un-optimized directory listing titles and descriptions. When search engines do this, it can have a significantly negative impact on your click-through rate.

To prevent Google from using your DMOZ title and description, use:

<meta content=”noodp” />

To prevent Yahoo from using your Yahoo Directory title and description, use:

<meta content=”noydir” />

To prevent Bing from using your DMOZ title and description, use:

<meta content=”noodp” />

Or you can just target all of them at once like this:

<meta content=”noodp,noydir” />

• All other meta tags are meaningless when it comes to search engine rankings. The only other meta tags you’ll ever want to use are the NOINDEX, NOARCHIVE, or NOFOLLOW robots meta tags, and that’s only when you want to prevent search engines from indexing, storing, or following links on one of your pages.
• Each page should have a single h1 or heading  tag containing the primary keyword phrase you’re targeting for that page. This is the main heading for the page and is an important ranking factor. Generally you can just re-use whatever optimized text you’re using for the title tag of the page. This means users will see prominently displayed text on your page which matches the title of the listing they just clicked in the search results. This provides a sense of continuity which translates to a good user experience.
• If appropriate, use h2 and h3 tags for subheadings. Don’t reuse the h1 tag—limit the h1 tag to one per page.
• Use your keywords in lists, bolding, and italics where appropriate. But don’t get carried away, as these are mostly minor ranking factors. Instead, focus on formatting your page so that it’s easy to read.
• Use your keywords in the alt text and title of your images, especially if those images are also links. Alt text acts as the anchor text for image links, so it’s critical that you employ it. However, make sure the alt text is also descriptive and readable—not arbitrarily keyword-stuffed. Text based links are always going to work best for ranking purposes. But, if you must use image links, make sure they have alt and title text attributes.

The Alt text attribute is designed to be an alternative information source for people that have images disabled in their browser, and is critical for ranking well in image search engines. The image Title tag is meant to provide additional information about the image. Google’s Chrome Browser uses the Title tag when you mouseover an image, and not the alt tag text like Internet Explorer.

• Optimize your anchor text. Make sure the anchor text (or alt text for image links) you use to link your pages together is both descriptive and contains the keywords you want the linked page to rank for.
• Don’t just rely on your site’s navigation menus or Sitemap to link your pages together. Make sure your internal pages have links within their main content body linking to other internal pages on your site. But keep those links primarily pointing at pages within that page’s own category to keep from diluting the focus of each category.

That’s it, you’re done! Once you’ve completed all of the above, your on-page keyword placement is finished. From here on out, most of your returns will come from building links to the page and improving the page’s sales conversion ratio.

Tagged as: crawl, keywords, linked, on page optimization, on page seo, page rank, search engine optimization, search engine spiders, SEO, seo friendly website, top rankings

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