Read if: you are interested in website optimization and search engine rankings and you need SEO tips and tricks
Website owners need to optimize their sites for the most popular search engines if they want to generate maximum opportunities for them. SEO has long been discussed for its effectiveness and usefulness. The truth is – you could elaborate a great website with all the features, but it would be useless if it is not visible to your potential clients. In this article you will find the most important SEO elements and tendencies for website optimization.
On-page optimization
Before building or redoing a web site it is necessary to set goals and set a marketing scheme. They depend on your goals. Know what you want to achieve with the website and think of possible outcomes from your SEO efforts. The most important part of the on-page SEO are title tags. Websites, which have the same title on every page waste their ranking potential. Search engines look at several factors to determine a page’s relevance to the search and where it is ranked. The major role is played by keyword usage, including the domain name. (The different search engines have specific algorithms, made up of factors such as social metrics and traffic estimation)
Keywords bring visitors to the websites. For that reason, we need to choose the correct ones for our needs. Google Adwords Tool can provide you with information about your competition as well as how many global/local searches are made for each keyword. How to figure out which ones are the right for us? For example, if we sell bracelets and we type “jewelry boutique shop” we will see that it has a high competition level, which won’t rank us on the first page in a semi-timely manner. It is better to target other less competitive keywords such as “fashion jewellery accessories” that are more likely to lead to conversion. The point is to attract the right type of traffic that will bring more revenue for its owner. Some tips here:
- Include keywords in your title in a specific way: put the most important keyword at the start of the tag, a secondary preference into the middle and at the end your brand name. In this way, the titles will make sense to the search engines and will raise your brand awareness.
- Use attention grabbing headlines (make combinations with the keywords which are naturally used by searchers)
- Insert them in other title tags as well
- Make sure they are included within the first 50-100 words of body texts
- Make internal links (anchor text) to other relevant pages within your site
- Include them in your images using the tag
- Keyword density must be 3%-5%. Search engines disregard websites, stuffed with keywords and stop showing them in their search results.
The META description is also important, as it is your site’s advert on the SERPs and it is the first phrase your potential visitors will see. Generic META descriptions, which do not say a lot about the content of the page are not attractive. Start with a short sentence, which includes a relevant keyword. Do not jump over 20 words, as search engines limit the amount of text shown. The description is used in site links, which appear below your main site listing for some keywords and give you extra prominence.
The domain name should accurately represent your brand. It is better if it has the exact name of your business or a similar one, with strong association. That’s how your brand will be recognized and you will get more clicks. The shorter your domain is, the better. Short words are easy to remember and will avoid confusions. If matching the exact name is impossible, develop and market a slogan or a mascot, which symbolizes your business. If you have the chance, pick up a recognizable extension like ”.com”. They are more clickable, because people are familiar with them.
Outbound Links: express your appreciation to others, but make sure that your outbound links are pointing only to trusted sources and avoid at all cost linking to “bad neighborhood” and spamming sites.
Backlinks are important if you want to rank well in Google. Their origin has to be from: trusted, high authority domain names, with high PR; several root domains, relevant to your niche; keyword focused anchor text.
Marketing experts prognosticated the eventual decline of SEO. In fact, SEO is evolving into a new form of marketing, whose core is social media. It is expected that Social Media Optimization will rule the online advertising in the coming decade. SMO lets your audience to share content they like and value it with their friends. By adding “like” and “tweet” buttons you will be able to identify your audience and you will let social media users promote your content for free. The SEO expert Rohit Bhargava gives the following tips for successful SMO:
- Make tagging and bookmarking easy
- Increase your link ability
- Reward inbound links
- Help your content travel
- Encourage the mash up, interact with your audience
- Get communities connected
- Make content sharing easy - add handy plugins like Gigya and AddThis to your pages.
A powerful website has to be also mobile-fiendly, we live in a mobile world. With all the devices, which have full internet browsing capabilities, every website owner needs to optimize his page for the mobile internet users. You can do this with the WP plug in WP Touch. Recently Google AdWords Keyword added a section “important and searchable” mobile data, that’s why this is a SEO element you should not ommit.
Optimize your website for Bing
Since Google became the most popular Search Engine, SEO companies concentrated their business on helping their customers achieve higher visibility in the Search Giant. They spend enormous efforts to stay in touch with the latest speculations on Google’s infamous algorithms and how they do effect search engine results. Reports on the first quarters of 2011 has shown that the number of Google users is dropping by 1% each month, because internet users pass on Google’s biggest contender – Bing. It has similar sense rules :
- Sites with more content on them are looked more favorably by Bing, as pages that have more than 300 words of text;
- Outgoing links to relevant resources are also appreciated by Bing
The differencies:
- Backlinks don’t matter that much as in Google. Bing is great for ranking with an exact match of domain names
- Bing takes into account the age and number of pages on a site;
- Google page rank does not take precedent on the Bing search results;
The most effective way to optimize your website for Bing is to make your content succinct and to use right keyword phrases in a minimal amount. Bing prefers human friendly texts. Some tips here:
- Include popular search terms in the page text that individuals might use to find the site
- Limit the size of all the pages
- Make sure that every page can be reached by at least one static text link
- If you want text to be indexed do not put it inside images
