SEO Tutorial 5: Basic Site Optimization
After all the planning that you have done for your SEO, it is time to take these things into action.
As proposed by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin in Search Engine Optimization (an hour a day), there are 4 tasks that you need to do for a basic site optimization:
1. Page Titles. Some of the tips are:
- Keep it short (around 40-60 characters).
- Include your keywords and your name / company name.
- Write unique titles for each page.
2. Meta Tags. There are two particular tags to focus in: description and keywords. Tips for each:
Description:
- Keep it informative and eye-catching.
- Pair it up with your page title.
- Include your keywords whenever possible.
Keywords:
- Use keywords that you have listed that are relevant to the page.
- Add company name and your location in the keywords.
3. Robot Walk-through. Have your pages been indexed successfully by search engine robots? If not, the following are some of the reasons:
1. Robots cannot follow your links (maybe because they are in JavaScript).
2. Your landing pages are stand-alone (no other pages are connecting to it).
3. Server outage. It is possible that when the robot tried to visit your site, it was down.
4. Site is too big. Robots do not index all your pages. Keep your landing pages with a maximum of 2 clicks away.
5. Robots were asked to stay away. If you have meta name “robots” and it is set to “noindex” or “nofollow”, then it is most likely that the robots do not visit the page.
6. Site is penalized. Your site has violated the search engine guidelines. Thus, robots are banned from indexing your website.
4. Site Text. Search through the body text of your pages. Perform the following if possible for each page:
- swap out certain words with your keywords.
- swap out images containing your keywords with a background image with floating text.
- swap out all general keywords terms with your specific keywords.
- include keywords in links whenever possible.
- add keyword-rich captions into photos.
- add keyword-rich tagline at the bottom of the page.
- add keywords to the page header.
So, for to-do list:
1. Change your page titles, meta descriptions and keywords, and body texts so that they are optimized with your keywords.
Words of cautions:
1. Please do not overdo it. Overwhelming the robots with keywords will not work. Remember to make sure your site is also readable to your REAL users. It is pointless to have a site that is NOT readable by your users.
2. Remember to always keep it short and informative. Robots will not index all your texts and keywords.
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April 16th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
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