Background
Search engines are not the only method of internet marketing, but it is an extremely important element in driving people to your website. Social networking, aggregation, newsfeeds and outside the scope of this article. Cube will be publishing followup articles on driving traffic using each of these methods.
Introduction
These are some simple steps you can take to achieve a significantly higher ranking on search engines, without recourse to search engine optimisation companies. If you follow these instructions you should see great results within about six weeks. If you need to go further, then you'll need to put in some serious effort. We can help you optimise your site. But following the steps below will provide a solid foundation on which to build your web traffic.
Search engines determine a quantitative quality score for each document it discovers on the web. When a user searches for a particular keyword combination, the search engine returns documents relevant to those keywords and sorts them with the highest scoring documents returned first.
The trick then is to work out what the search engines use to quantify quality and develop documents that conform to those rules and bingo a top ranking. The problem is that the search engines are constantly vying with each other to deliver the best results, and therefore the rules change frequently. Thats why no-one can guarantee a ranking on any search engine - except the search engine company itself.
Domain Name Registration and Hosting
Step 1 - Make sure that your domain name is properly registered
Use an ICANN accredited supplier (currently blacknight.com in Ireland) to register your domain name, ensure you or your body corporate is listed as the owner of the site. You also need to make sure that you register it for more than 1 year. Many companies register thousands of domain names for a year, and see if someone wants to buy it. They also sweat the asset by using the domain name to advertise other websites. Search engines use this registration data to help determine whether a website is likely to contain quality information.
If you think about this yourself, you'd probably prefer to get your infomation or products from a company that is likely to be around for a while.
Step 2 - Hosting Quality and Speed
Search Engines are now also using website speed as a quality measure. So its important that the service you host your website with provides not only sufficient resources to deliver the documents quickly, but also has sufficient low latency bandwidth to deliver it to the search engines quickly.
In the real world, you don't want to have to wait a long time for a response from a website, so its a reasonable measure of quality for a search engine.
Getting Banned
Step 3 - Keep your site secure and up to date
Probably the biggest disaster that can happen to your site is either getting defaced, being injected with malware, getting on a site blacklist, or a search engine banning your site from their index. If you are using a content management system or some other framework, you need to ensure that the software is kept up to date, and that the permissions on the site are set correctly. If you don't have the time or skills to do this, there are plenty of companies out there to do that. Many of the quality ISPs will send you an email when a new release of the software is made available.
If you do get banned, then you need to get the problem fixed, and then make a request to the search engine or blacklist to get your site re-instated. The consequences for your ranking should not be underestimated, so best not to get into that situation.
Search Engine Friendly URLS (SEF)
Step 4 - Construct URLS which contain information about the content of the page.
If you saw http://www.cubecreative.ie/administrator/index.php?option=com_content§ionid=2&task=edit&cid[]=24 as the URL for a document, its not telling you very much about the document is it, so you need to make the URL much more descriptive. so http://www.cubecreative.ie/Computers-and-Electronics/LCD-Televisions/Toshiba-15inch-LCD make much more sense to you and me and the same for search engines. URLs are also a very important part of document content and quality determination for search engines.
I know from the URL that we are looking at information about LCD televisions, and in particular a Toshiba 15inch LCD Television, its the same for a search engine.
You can use hypen in the address, search engines see this as a space, but don't use other non-numeric characters.
How do you do that ?
If you are using a Content Management System, it can be as simple as turning on some options in the menu, or loading some sef url modules. if you are using a handcrafted site, then renaming the files and re-pionting the links may be all you need to do. But don't forget, that google will have indexed your site already, so you need to make sure that the old URLs work until the search engines revisit. This is where the robot tags are important, so you can tell the SE not to index the old files.
Document Quality
Documents are split into a number of distinct elements - Title,Meta Data ( Description, Keywords, robots) and Body.
Step 5 - Ensure that the head tags contain consistent information about the content of the document.
Title
Like any written document, it should have a title; the title should be short and to the point, try and convey the key message in the first 64 characters of the tite,it needs to be consistent with the description, and the body. Don't make it over long or pad it out with keywords.
Do not use special characters in the title such as --, ....., ->. The Search engines read this as dash dash, dot dot dot dot, dash less than, so unless you are talking about dots and dashes in your article its not a good idea.
Do use Capital Letters to emphasize words, such as Toshiba LCD TV not toshiba lcd tv
A Big no-no is to use the same title for multiple documents, or not to supply any title. Wouldn't you get confused if you saw an index with the same title for many documents.
<title>Toshiba 15inch LCD Television from Computers and Electronics</title>
Description (META)
The description describes the content of the body of the document, it should be longer than the title, and long enough to describe the contents of the body but no longer. Its also what the searcher will see as the summary on the search page. So you need to adequately describe the content, so that the potential visitor wants to read more.
<meta name="description" content="Toshiba LCD 15inch High-Definition TV w/DVD combo TV tuners: digital (ATSC) & analog (NTSC) over-the-air, QAM cable,16:9 widescreen design,1366 x 768 pixels" />
Robots (META)
The robots tag is used by search engine indexing programs to determine whether to index a document, and also whether to follow links in the document. If you set this to "no", it will not be indexed.
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" /> or <meta name="robots" content="noindex, (no)follow" />
Document Body Construction
Document Construction for bots
Bots typically don't search the entire document. So you want your content near the beginning of the document. If you have 3 columns and a huge left column for menus or product categories, its going to think thats your document. It might index that only and not the meat of the document. So you need to ensure that your content is the first column specified in the document, even if its the middle column. A good web designer can design a template that enables you to edit content like this easily.
Headings/font weight
Documents are made up of html elements (such as heading 1 <h1>, heading 2 <h2> , emphasis <strong> and paragraph <p> Certain of these are used by search engines to determine the semantics of your document. Heading 1 <h1> is used to highlight important words, Heading 2 <h2> is less important words - although still important in the context, and words in bold, are of lesser importance but still important. Combining this information with the notes on title and description, can form a view as to whether the words in the title, description and html elements are consistent. So make sure that your document is consistent - don't worry about stuffing keywords related to other documents in this one - focus on this document in itself.
Spelling and Grammar
Search engines have not quite got the ability to check spelling and grammar, but be assured that they will, not only that but your human readers will be left disappointed if they find spelling mistakes. it only takes seconds to run the document through a spell/grammar checker so take the time.
Body/Content
The content must be relevant to the other elements of the document construction - title, meta data. Make sure that you don't over do it with the word-smithing in order to stuff as many keywords in the doucment as possible. Keep the document short and to the point, with the important elements near the top of the document. Search engines only look part of the way down a document, so be sure to follow these rules rigorously.
Lastly but not Least - Web Standards
The worldwide web consortium (w3c) defines the rules on how mark up should be constructed. So ensure that your documents are constructed to these standards and that there are no markup errors. You can check using an add-in for firefox - there's lots about My favourite is html validator. Don't forget people with disabilities, so ensure that all your images have alt tags, and titles. You fill in the image information fields for each image, and listen don't use tables for documents unless its truly a table of data, use divs. It allows screen readers (and google bots) to easily read and index your words.