Thursday, February 08, 2007
Pimp My Website - SEO Edition
Pimp My Website – The Search Engine Optimization Edition
By now, everybody knows about the kind of positive financial impact that can be had by obtaining and sustaining high rankings in the major search engines. Being on the first page of Google, Yahoo and MSN can pay huge dividends. As such, trying to get there should always worth your time.
Fortunately, if you start treating your web site like your car, you’ll be able to navigate the rocky search engine terrain with much more ease. In fact, the following “site tune-ups” may be all you need to improve your site’s performance (ranking) in the natural (organic) listings:
Underneath the Hood
One of the most important things you can do for your website is to make sure you’ve got good code structure. Basically, the longer it takes the major search engine crawlers to get to relevant content in your pages, the lower they will rank your pages in their results. If your content is buried deep in nested table after nested table, or if you include lengthy CSS styles or application scripts in your HTML documents, it will take longer for the crawlers to spider their way through these lines of code to reach the content of your site.
If analyzing your code structure doesn’t sounds like a day the beach, let your interactive agency or web development professional help. Just like a car mechanic, they can help you fine tune your engine.
The Exterior
Once your code structure is in place, it’s important to note how the site looks from the outside. Or more importantly, it is important to know how your site looks from the outside to the search engines. In particular, search engines frown on sites built in all Flash and or in frames, as the web crawlers cannot navigate through those sites very easily. What’s more a site built with tables bloats your code and takes ages to maintain. To get rankings, your site should be built in CSS. (Cascading Style Sheets). Not only is it easier to maintain but most importantly to you, it is easier to place content so that it gets “spidered” first.
The Interior
The content of your website can really make a difference- not only to the search engines but also to your site visitors. Our rule of thumb is to make it comfortable for both, so that the search engines can find and properly index your site but also so that the people coming to your site will convert into customers. Unlike traditional writing, SEO copywriting involves keyword density – typically keywords are used 3-5% of the total words on your page. To write effective, strike a balance between writing for the search engines and writing for humans. If your text sounds funny to you, it will sound funny to your site visitors.
Extras
Other important elements that will really make your site go involve optimizing your Meta Tags and obtaining inbound links to your site. Meta Tag optimization involves placing your primary keywords in your title, description and keyword tags first. Obtaining inbound links, on the other hand, involves making a concerted effort to get people to link to you. While that could take the form of blogging, article writing, link trading, and/or buying links, resource linking is a difference maker – that give your site much better mileage.
Ron Weber is the President of SD Interactive, a San Diego Based Interactive agency. He can be reached at ron@sdinteractive.com. Come visit his site at www.sdinteractive.com.
By now, everybody knows about the kind of positive financial impact that can be had by obtaining and sustaining high rankings in the major search engines. Being on the first page of Google, Yahoo and MSN can pay huge dividends. As such, trying to get there should always worth your time.
Fortunately, if you start treating your web site like your car, you’ll be able to navigate the rocky search engine terrain with much more ease. In fact, the following “site tune-ups” may be all you need to improve your site’s performance (ranking) in the natural (organic) listings:
Underneath the Hood
One of the most important things you can do for your website is to make sure you’ve got good code structure. Basically, the longer it takes the major search engine crawlers to get to relevant content in your pages, the lower they will rank your pages in their results. If your content is buried deep in nested table after nested table, or if you include lengthy CSS styles or application scripts in your HTML documents, it will take longer for the crawlers to spider their way through these lines of code to reach the content of your site.
If analyzing your code structure doesn’t sounds like a day the beach, let your interactive agency or web development professional help. Just like a car mechanic, they can help you fine tune your engine.
The Exterior
Once your code structure is in place, it’s important to note how the site looks from the outside. Or more importantly, it is important to know how your site looks from the outside to the search engines. In particular, search engines frown on sites built in all Flash and or in frames, as the web crawlers cannot navigate through those sites very easily. What’s more a site built with tables bloats your code and takes ages to maintain. To get rankings, your site should be built in CSS. (Cascading Style Sheets). Not only is it easier to maintain but most importantly to you, it is easier to place content so that it gets “spidered” first.
The Interior
The content of your website can really make a difference- not only to the search engines but also to your site visitors. Our rule of thumb is to make it comfortable for both, so that the search engines can find and properly index your site but also so that the people coming to your site will convert into customers. Unlike traditional writing, SEO copywriting involves keyword density – typically keywords are used 3-5% of the total words on your page. To write effective, strike a balance between writing for the search engines and writing for humans. If your text sounds funny to you, it will sound funny to your site visitors.
Extras
Other important elements that will really make your site go involve optimizing your Meta Tags and obtaining inbound links to your site. Meta Tag optimization involves placing your primary keywords in your title, description and keyword tags first. Obtaining inbound links, on the other hand, involves making a concerted effort to get people to link to you. While that could take the form of blogging, article writing, link trading, and/or buying links, resource linking is a difference maker – that give your site much better mileage.
Ron Weber is the President of SD Interactive, a San Diego Based Interactive agency. He can be reached at ron@sdinteractive.com. Come visit his site at www.sdinteractive.com.
