How to Optimize Our Website In Better Ways
1) Meta Title Tag: It is the essential component of on page optimization which helps us to obtain high ranking in search engine. That’s y the words of the title tag are shown on the clickable link of the search engine. For doing SEO of any website we need to create a unique title for each page on your site. The Length for Meta Title Tag is 50-60 chars. The <title> tag should be placed within the <head> tag of the HTML document.
For example: <head>
<title>Example Title</title>
</head>
2) Meta description Tag: Meta description tag describes the whole content of your website. It should contain the keywords which we want to rank in search engine. The length for Meta description tag is 150-160 chars. Google Webmaster Tools check the each and every word separately. Google Webmaster Tools provides a Handy content analysis section that'll tell you about any description Meta tags that are too short, long, or duplicated too many times. Like the <title> tag, the description Meta tag is placed within the <head> tag of your HTML document. Meta descriptions are commonly used on search engine result pages (SERPs) to display preview snippets for a given page. Use unique descriptions for each page.
For example: <head>
<meta name="description" content="This is an example of a meta description. This will often show up in search results.">
</head>
3) URL Structure: A site's URL structure should be as simple as possible. Consider using punctuation in your URLs. The URL http://www.example.com/green-dress.html is much more useful to us than http://www.example.com/greendress.html. If your URL contains relevant words, this provides users and search engines with more information about the page than an ID or oddly named parameter would. URLs are displayed in search results. Unnecessarily high numbers of URLs can be caused by a number of issues. So, wherever possible, avoid the use of session IDs in URLs.
For example: if you're searching for information about aviation, a URL like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation will help you decide whether to click that link. A URL like http://www.example.com/index.php?id_sezione=360&sid=3a5ebc944f41daa6f849f730f1, is much less appealing to users.
4) Make your site easier to navigate: Navigation is very important for search engines. The navigation of a website is important in helping visitors quickly find the content they want.
Make sure that you have internal links to every page on your site. Don’t put too many navigation options on a page because you’ll have too many internal links. A breadcrumb is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the /page that allows visitors to quickly navigate back to a previous section or the root page. Internal linking shows the importance of different pages within your site, so pages in the universal navigation will rank better than pages further down in the navigational structure.
5) Allow for the possibility of a part of the URL being removed: If we delete the last part of the URL on many sites, they get an error message that directory browsing is forbidden. You can instead use an .htaccess file or an index.php/default.asp file to redirect the user to the page you prefer.
For example: if you delete the last part of this URL hoping to see what other places I have under /photos/rest/ you are redirected to an index page:
http://www.jeffersonscher.com/photos/rest/ShaoMountain/
How? There's an index.php file in /photos/rest/ with this code:
<?php
header("Location: http://www.jeffersonscher.com/photos/index.html#food");
exit;
?>
If it gives a 404 ("page not found" error), we need to check with our web hosting provider on how to set up a custom 404 page.
6) Preparing Sitemaps: A site map (lower-case) is a simple page on your site that displays the structure of your website. Or it is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users.
We can create sitemap in two versions:
• XML: An XML Sitemap is a structured format that a user doesn't need to see, but it tells the search engine about the pages in your site, their relative importance to each other and how often they are updated.
• HTML: HTML sitemaps are designed for the user to help them find content on the page and don't need to include each and every subpage. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.
There are few sites available which allow us to create sitemap in html or xml versions: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
7) Offer quality content and services: Original and well written quality content is the most important requirement if we want any site to give good results in search engine s. The search phrases that people use varies depending on their interest, skill level in the subject, and understanding. Consider creating a new, useful service that no other site offers.
Some Basics for Generating New Content:
• Write Easy to Read Text: People like to read things that are easy to understand.
• Stay Organized: Keep topics and sub-topics separate.
• Create Fresh, Unique Content: Avoid duplicating someone else’s content.
8) Write better anchor text: Anchor text is the clickable text that users will see as a result of a link, and is placed within the anchor tag <a href="..."></a>. It is also known as link label, link text and link title. Whatever the link, it’s always best to use descriptive, concise, well formatted links to benefit both viewers and search engines.
9) Optimize your use of images: If we want more traffic for our website, we have to learn how to optimize images in a proper way. Before you upload your image, pick a descriptive filename—preferably a file name you want that image to rank for—because it will help with us to achieve better rankings in search engines.
For example: <img src=”http://www.quicksprout.com/foggygoldengatebridge.jpg” alt=”Golden Gate Bridge covered by fog” />
Image optimization elements are:
• Alt Tag: Alt tags are a text alternative to images that search engines can’t read, you need to use alt tags to help describe your image. The words of the alt tag are shown when you move the cursor over the image of a particular website.
For example: Alt=”Golden Gate Bridge covered by fog”
• Remove watermarks
• Upload original image
Store files in specialized directories and manage them using common file formats: Use Commonly supported file types - Most browsers support JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP image formats. It's also a good idea to have the extension of your filename match with the file type.
10) Use heading tags appropriately: The <header> tag specifies a header for a document or section.
The six different HTML headings:
<h1>This is heading 1</h1>
<h2>This is heading 2</h2>
<h3>This is heading 3</h3>
<h4>This is heading 4</h4>
<h5>This is heading 5</h5>
<h6>This is heading 6</h6>
The <h1> to <h6> tags are used to define HTML headings. <h1> defines the most important heading. <h6> defines the least important heading.
11) Make effective use of robots.txt: Web site owners use the /robots.txt file to give instructions about their site to web robots; this is called The Robots Exclusion Protocol. A "robots.txt" file tells search engines whether they can access and therefore crawl parts of your site. This file, which must be named robots.txt", is placed in the root directory of your site.
We can create robot.txt file using Robots.txt analyzer. Google Webmaster Tools has a friendly robots.txt generator to help you create this file.
For example: Allow indexing of everything: User-agent: * Allow: /
Disallow indexing of everything: User-agent: * Disallow: /
Disallow indexing of a specific folder: User-agent: * Disallow: /folder/
12) Be aware of rel="nofollow" for links: Google defines it as a way for webmasters to tell search engines “Don’t follow links on this page” or “Don’t follow this specific link.” Setting the value of the "rel" attribute of a link to "nofollow" will tell Google that certain links on your site shouldn't be followed or pass your page's reputation to the pages linked to. Nofollowing a link is adding rel="nofollow" inside of the link's anchor tag.
• Suppose now we want a whole page that contains links, should not be indexed, then what to do?
• Ans: HTML has a wonderful tag called Meta tag, which will help you in this job, just add the same rel=”nofolow” attribute in the Meta tag, and the job is done, the page will not be followed. See the code bellow which will help you in using the Meta tag.
For example: <html>
<head>
<title>Example Article</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”This will be used for the description of your article which indeed help you in optimization of your article”/>
<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow”/>
</head>
<body>
13) Notify Google of mobile sites: Mobile sites not only use a different format from normal desktop sites, but the management methods and expertise required are also quite different. While many mobile sites were designed with mobile viewing in mind, they weren’t designed to be search friendly.
Verify that your mobile site is indexed by Google: If your web site doesn't show up in the results of a Google mobile search even using the site: operator, it may be that your site has one or both of the following issues:
• Googlebot may not be able to find your site
• Googlebot may not be able to access your site
Verify that Google can recognize your mobile URLs: Once Googlebot - Mobile crawls your URLs, we then check for whether each URL is viewable on a mobile device. Pages we determine aren't viewable on a mobile phone won't be included in our mobile site index.
14) Guide mobile users accurately: Most common problems for every webmasters who run both mobile and desktop versions of a site are that the mobile version is appearing on user's desktop computer or vice versa.
There are two options in dealing with this kind of problem:
• Redirecting every mobile user to the correct version: Once a mobile user or crawler accesses the desktop version of a URL, you can be able to redirect it to the matching mobile version. Google can identify the relationships between two versions of the URL which displays for the searches the standard version and the mobile searches in a mobile version.
• Switch content based on User-agent: Most sites have the same URL for both mobile and desktop content, but the format is changed accordingly to User-agent (desktop or mobile phone). Therefore, both mobile and desktop users can access the same URL, but the content/format would change slightly depending on which is being used. Take note that failure to configure your site properly could result in search engines considering the mobile version to be a “cloak” (an attempt in boosting search engine rankings by serving different content to Googlebot than two regular users) that eventually will lead to site disappearing from every search results. Google use “Googlebot” for website searches and “Googlebot-Mobile” for mobile searches. In order to follow the right guidelines, serve the same content typically for a web user that they would see and a mobile user. Actually you may want to provide a little less graphics on the mobile version to compensate the small space and load times.
15) Promote your website in the right ways: No matter how well you promote your website, and no matter how much money you put into it, you will still need to have a great content that people want to share.
Few ways to promote your website in the right ways are:
• Article Directories
• Business Directories
• Classifieds
• Forums
• Social Bookmarking Sites
• Search Engines Submission
• Pay per Click Advertising (PPC)
• Link Exchanges
• Video Marketing
• Blogs creation
• Social Media
16) Make use of free webmaster tools: It allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites. Google Webmaster Tool shows traffic for each keyword separately; it gives more information about website performance according to Google search query. This tool does not cover search results from other search engines, such as Bing, Yahoo, or Baidu.
Google Analytics: Google Analytics shows total traffic for a website, such as clicks to your site, regardless of where they came from and what search terms were used. It shows whatever search terms brought up your site in the listings. While your keywords might be there too, many may be specific terms or long-tail search terms.
