Valeo Marketing

SEO Tips – Part 1

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  • Setup a Google Webmaster Central account to monitor your site’s robots crawl status, HTTP errors,  search keyword traffic, indexed pages, back-links and many more  diagnostic & information tools. Google provides this at no cost  to you.
  • To appear higher in Google’s  organic search results, the foremost thing you should do is to  remove spider traps, like long URL’s, too much JavaScript, Flash or  other rich media on your pages and improper URL redirects. Check  your site if it is clearly mapped out for Google (Yahoo!, MSN etc)  to get your site indexed easily. You may want to use content lists,  like categories or a sitemap too.
  • The file name of the webpage plays  a small role in improving the search engine relevance. Using short  keywords in the file name not only helps identifying the page  content but also improves page relevance for the term. Also,  make sure you use hyphens ‘-‘ between keywords instead of  underscores ‘_’. Google considers hyphen as a space and underscores as a merged single word.
  • Avoid using subdomains unless  absolutely necessary as search engines often treat them as a  separate domain and limit the pass-through of the trust value of  your main site to it.
  • Make sure to mention your  geographical information like your real world address on your pages.  This information should be included in HTML so that the spiders can  read and distinguish it. Modern bots are looking for area codes, zip codes and city names to assist their Search Engine users in locating stores and services near their location. This will provide you a  competitive advantage when someone searches for your business.
  • If for some reason, you have no option other than using flash, there is something called Macromedia SDK that helps search engines to understand what the page (or website) is about as it helps the bots  to crawl through the flash page. You may also want to add more  keyword rich content in ‹NOEMBED› tags.
  • Don’t just rely on a single way, for Search Engines to index your website. Most importantly, you must  put link to new pages on your site map. Update your Google site map  every time you add a new page. If there’s a corresponding page on  your site that you can use to link to the new page, do so. Don’t  forget to mention your new page on your blog. In case of blogs, ping  Google, Yahoo, technorati, etc every time you post a blog.
  • It always helps your ranking to  have a keyword in your domain name, given that you have strong  internal and external linking for the same keyword. If you have  useful content on your website, people will link to your website  using your domain name as anchor text (which carries your keyword),  so your ranking for that keyword will improve. But even if you don’t  have a keyword in your domain name, there’s no need to worry as the off page factors contribute to rankings. For e.g. consider Adobe, it  is the top result out of 3 billion results for the keyword phrase  “click here”. This is because of the off-page factors, and not owing to presence (or absence) of “click here” in Adobe’s domain name.
  • You must pay attention while writing the title and description for your website. Your page may only be ranking number 5 or 6 on Search Engines, but if you’ve taken enough time to create an enticing title and description for all your  pages, you may still manage to earn the same CTR as the one sitting  on the number one spot. Similarly, a website ranking number one for a keyword might have a poor CTR if the webmaster hasn’t put in enough thought while writing the website’s title and description.
  • Anchor text is one of the best places to insert your keyword phrases. Go through your website and look for phrases like ‘Click here for a quote’, ‘Click here for more  information’ etc. Suppose ‘Click here for a mortgage loan quote’ or  ‘Click here for more Denver coffee shop information’. But make sure the entire sentence is a link or if not, at least make the keyword  phrase a link.