Search Engine Ranking – From the Beginning
I have been operating web sites for the last couple of years. I have developed a proven method of getting the sites I run into the search engines quickly. I then use that same method to help get them to rank well for a small number of keywords, allowing the buoyancy effect to come into play for the rest of the site when one or two keywords ranks very high. In case you were not aware, when one or two keywords rank well within a given site, many secondary keywords enjoy a buoyancy effect and are lifted because of the nice rankings of the main keywords.
I like to review a handful of concepts with the design team before we launch a new site. I like to start by checking for H1 and H2 tags being used throughout the main pages of the web site. Search engine spiders are quick to notice and crawl text in these tags, so they are important in helping the spiders to understand the theme of the site. With good content and the right tags to support them, the site will quickly be crawled by the spiders, the theme will be correctly derived and the search engines can start sending traffic to the site when people request information using the keywords.
Anchor text pointing to other key pages on the site is another area I will check. I am typically able to help web sites get a boost in the search engines by reviewing images and moving the text in the images out into the web page itself. Text contained in an image is not able to be read by the search engines so the site is missing out on the spider being able to read the text inside of the image. The best solution I tend to use is to reduce the size of the image and attractively position the text around the image in a manner that does not destroy the aesthetic appeal of the original image.
I always like to have a unique page for each main keyword of the site so it can highlighted appropriately. Search engines always like to be able to go to a page where the name of the page is the same as the keyword, it gives it an intrinsic value. An example is that of wedding flowers where the home page would contain wedding flowers in anchor text and point to a unique page with the title and html name of wedding flowers. With this convention in place, the search engines will know exactly what to do and will reward the site with the right theme and keyword indexing.
The next item I look for is the use of dashes and not underscores. I have heard, seen and witnessed countless examples of pages not being indexed as well because of the use of underscores. I cannot explain why (I do not know) but I know that this is an issue and should be avoided. Two pages called almost the same name, wedding-photographer.htm and wedding_photographer.htm , will not score equally in the search engines, all else remaining equal. It has been proven time and again so please stay away from it.
I also will question the search engines to find out what they think the theme of the site really is. I have found the best tool to use is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. I always enjoy finding out what the search engines think the site is about by looking at the main keywords it gives back as the result. I am always amazed to see what the search engines think the site is really about and then get to work fixing their perspective. Most often the issues are easily fixed by adding some H2 tags and by adding no follow lines to some of the links in the site. If you and the search engines disagree on the theme of your site the situation can easily be turned around.
Filed under: Internet Business