Website optimization techniques and SEO techniques to start getting your website ranked
The details below will give you an outline of factors that you should include in the development of your website. Keeping these factors in your mind as you are building and expanding your website will help increase your website visibility to all the search engines and create a complementing user experience for your website visitors.
1. title tag html
Ensure that your keywords are inside the <title> tag. The <title> tag is the text displayed in the clickable link on the search engine results page. The <title> tag for this web page is set to 'Website optimization and SEO techniques to start getting your website ranked'. You can check where this tag is set in the document by selecting View -> Page Source in your browser.
Take time to name your <title> tag and ensure it accurately reflects the content of your page.
latest articles with information on the html title tag
2. Use SEO Friendly URL's
Avoid creating dynamic URL's with the characters ? = & _ in them. Create URL's with meaningful descriptions and separate each word with a - character. This will give you the maximum SEO benefits for your page. Look at the title for this page and see how the words include the required key words and are separated by -'s.
3. <H1>, <H2>, <H3> tags and keywords
Ensure your keywords are used in the <H1>, <H2>, and <H3> tags to provide information to the search engine what your website is about and the content it contains.
- <H1> Put Keywords in this tag and use for website title.
- <H2> Title used for each page
- <H3> Sub-headings related to <H2> tags
- <H4> When further sub-heading of content topic <H3> is available use this tag.
- <H5> Not used much.
- <H6> Not used much.
4. Keywords in Image <alt> tag
Always provide a meaningful text description of any image on your website with your keyword used within the <alt> tag. People search for images and could find your site through the image link. The <alt> text is beneficial to people with visual disabilities and aids their experience of you website. This also translates into the search engine understanding and being able to read what your image is about as search engines can not see the actual image displayed.
5. Anchor Text
Do not use "click here" for any anchor text on your website. Anchor text is the words used within a hyperlink that people click on to move around your website. Use anchor text that is meaningful to the content being provided. This is important to both the readers of your site and to the search engine during it's crawl to understand what your website content provides. Ensuring keywords and descriptive text are used, this can improve your rankings and visibility.
6. Outbound linking
Linking from your website to other websites provides a way to increase knowledge of your websites subject matter and to ensure that the search engine knows that your subject matter is related to the sites you have linked to. Ensure you only link to quality websites that offer similar products and offer quality content. Linking to dubious websites will impact on your ranking.
7. The Power of Internal Linking
As you develop your website ensure that you are providing internal links to other content on your website. This internal linking process provides an important element of SEO and can maximise your ranking. This will make up part of your link building strategy and is a factor that is within your control to develop as your website grows.
8. Free directory links
There are hundreds of free online directories offering you the chance to be listed in their directory with the aim of increasing your visibility and website traffic. Be very careful which free directories you submit your website to as submitting to low quality sites can affect your ranking. Take time to investigate free directories that are relevant to your industry and website content. Quality not quantity is the key here.
9. <Description> and <keywords> metatags
<description> and <keywords> metatags are still important from a website visitor and search engine visitor point of view. <Description> metatag describes your site and is the description visitors are shown when your site is displayed on the search results. Think carefully about the details entered into both tags and ensure it is relevant to your website.
10. Website content
Keep your website content fresh and topical. Ensure you are adding new content over a period of time. If you don't have a team of article writers at your disposal try to create unique interesting and informative article content that people will link back to on your website as a reference or will be passed on to others as interesting. Quality not quantity will always give you an edge to improve your ranking. You have probably already visited websites and wasted time reading articles that don't give the facts your looking for. Don't be one of these sites.
11. Understanding Robots.txt
The Robots.txt file helps to improve site indexing by informing the crawler to only crawl and index your valuable content pages. These are the crawled pages that will provide visibility and higher ranking. The robots.txt tells the crawler which pages to exclude from the crawl. By not having your contact, faq and archives pages crawled you are keeping the crawler occupied with only the important pages you want to be found by.
12. Navigation by Sitemap
A Sitemap informs search engines of the path they should follow to effectively crawl your website. This map of your website enables the crawler to be more effective in its crawl which could means the crawler then indexes more pages and gives your site more visibility leading to a higher ranking. It is always easier to navigate with a map and you get to see more when you know where you are going. This results in the crawler having a more effective view of your website and can plan which pages to visit in the crawl time available for your website.
Create a Google Sitemap online and add your Sitemap to your Google Webmaster account to gain the maximum benefit form the sitemap process.
13. Site Accessibility
Making your website accessible to people with disabilities can provide a great benefit in attracting new customers to your website who will find interacting with your site easier because of the time taken to think about their needs with regard to certain disabilities. For example: Ensuring your website can be read by visually impaired people will create a much better user experience for them and have SEO benefits in the way your website is crawled.
14. First Paragraph - Keywords
Put your important keywords into the first paragraph to ensure search engines crawl and understand the content you are publishing. This is a very simple and effective method of SEO that can improve your website ranking and ensure higher visibility for your products and services.
15. Footer - Keywords
A simple SEO method of placing a link to your main page with your keyword as an anchor text may have a positive affect in your search engine ranking and help to maximize your visibilty.
16. Google Ads account
Create a Google Ads account and put a few ads on your website. Even if you are not interested in the potential revenue from Google Ads it will ensure that Google visits and crawls your site to validate you. This helps gains visibility in the first stages of your websites life and provides a simple SEO trick to get your page rank started.
Summary
Keep applying SEO practices to your website. Keep reading about SEO practices in blogs and books. Make SEO part of your thought process when developing and promoting your website. Keep your website content at a quality level, use keywords to your advantage and monitor both your inbound and outbound link building.