PeachyDragon.com Blog

Introduction

In order to provide my website customers with the best service I have decided to compile this document in order to aid my clients in making decisions regarding website optimization for search-engines as well as content choices.

There are many many things that are taken into consideration by Google when rating and ranking your site. By weighing these many factors the engine decides how high your site scores when ranked for certain search words. Did I mention there are MANY factors?

Everything, from how many years your domain is registered for, to how many visits you get, what your content, links and meta-tags consist of and how many people link to you, plays a part, to name a few. However, there are certain things that do matter more and are certainly not that difficult to implement considering that it directly affects your success in business. Here is my list.

Something to consider

When you register a new domain Google will put it in the “sand box” for anything from 3 to 6 months. This is to ensure that their results are not compromised by sites that are here one day and gone the next. It wont be featured in other words.

If you use paid links, not advertisements, but actually pay people to link to your site, or otherwise attempt to manipulate the system, your site will be blacklisted and won’t show up in search results at all. The same goes for trying to put your site on many worthless automatic link sites that are free-for-all.

The focus of the site should always be on good content. Never allow links to pages of your site that don’t exist yet, or which are under construction to compromise your content. Any missing pages, or images on your site, or missing pages that you link to on other sites will count against you.

Factors that work for you

1. Content

Make sure your content is well-written and uses words and concepts that you think people will search for. Realize that people on the internet have extremely short attention spans. Studies about how people surf the web have proven this over and over. People want it all and they want it now. If someone opens 10 pages for a search and can’t find what they were looking for on the page easily, they will simply leave. Do not duplicate content. You will get penalized in the rankings. My guide to writing content follows later.

2. Site updates

Old stale sites that sit on the web for 12 months are not considered as relevant as sites that are updated monthly or weekly. Even if you make small changes it still helps. Making changes to a page somewhere deep inside your site will be less obvious than changing text on your home page though.

3. Meta tags

These are tags that go into every page of the site and which are used behind the scenes by the search engines. I often write these for clients, but the best practice would be for clients to write these themselves, since they understand what potential clients might search for. Every page should have it’s own tags. Google penalizes duplicate tags and Google Webmaster tools sends me notifications of duplicates.

The tags that are used are the title tag, the description tag and the keywords tag.

The title tag is what you read in the blue bar at the top of the screen when you are viewing a web page. It should not be too long and could possibly contain the site name, page name and one or two key words or phrases.

The description tag is often the paragraph you see below a search result in Google and should also not be longer than two lines of text. It can be the same as the first paragraph on the page, but should communicate your message, hook the reader and contain keywords.

The keyword tag contains many words separated by a comma each. These words are ignored to some extent by many search engines, but still have their place. I recommend 10 to 20 keywords. More isn’t always better. It is possible to put whole phrases there which means that if someone searches for that exact phrase it counts in your favour. Don’t repeat the same word more than 4 times though.

The final and most important factor to keep in mind when writing these tags is that the content of the page and the words in ALL 3 tags should all be related. They won’t have any effect unless they seem truly credible and unless the page really contains that content prominently.

Once again, I encourage my clients to write these themselves since they understand what clients might search for in their industry.

4. In-links

This is probably THE most important factor once the others are all in place. Google rates the importance of your site by looking at how many people link to you, how good the sites are that link to you, and what text is used to link to you.

If you have a page about “Potatoes in Pretoria” which has good content, has that phrase in all the meta tags, has links with that text pointing to it from other pages in your site, and has 50 other websites linking to that page, all using the words “Potatoes in Pretoria” for those links, chances are that page will do VERY well if someone searched for that. Whether someone will search for that phrase is another matter all together.

If there is another page on another site, which is also about “Potatoes in Pretoria” which has 100 links to it with that link text, that page will most probably appear higher than your page for the same search. Links from sites related to your industry will be better than links from unrelated sites.

How do you get these links?

Create a page on your site for links. I usually call it “resources” since Google doesn’t value pages called “links” very much for obvious reasons.

The page should be linked on your home page and many other pages, but the link can be at the bottom of the page. It is mostly there for search engines. Do not worry too much about people reading it. Most people do not click on small text links at the bottom of the page.

Do not just put a bunch of links on this page. Make sure that each link has a description that goes with it. If you have a page with many links but no text, it will look suspicious and Google will not be likely to index it.

Ask people you know, or sites you find on Google if they wish to exchange links with you. Attempt to do this with popular high quality sites with a Page rank of 1 or more out of 8. Sites with a Page rank of 0 might be blacklisted unless they are brand new and linking to blacklisted sites will count against you. If someone agrees to link to you, politely ask if they can use the link text and description you supply.

You can vary the text used for the link, but the more you have for one phrase, the better your page will do for that phrase in search results.

You can’t start building link exchanges before your site is active. People would like to see what they are linking to. They might also be sceptical about linking to you before your Page rank is above 0.

Conclusion

Provide a clear indication of what you want on your site as well as how you might want it structured and what you would like on each page, e.g. content, an area for specials etc. If you have any idea what kind of look you would like, provide that too. Find examples of sites you like that could influence your site’s design.

Give your designer any logos, images, brand images and brand identity information before the process starts. Try to have all your content finalized and proof-read as soon as possible, otherwise it is possible that you might rush this phase and end up having to correct mistakes later.

Provide the meta tag information if you wish to get the best results. Not all companies have time to do this so it is sometimes necessary for the designer to take the initiative in such cases and make some decisions on their part.

For a fee I can Provide these SEO services for a client’s website. It is quite a time-consuming process and, depending on the client’s needs, can range in cost from R350 per month to R1000 per month. The client will still need to inform me which keywords they think are good to target. I can then research that further and seek a solution.

If you found this article useful you should also read my articles called How to write website content and make sure your design works and More thoughts you should have before starting a website

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Tags: graphic designers, keywords, marketing, optimising, optimizing, running a blog, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, successful site, updating content, updating websites, website, website content, writing website content

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 7th, 2010 at 22:03 by Peachy Dragon and is filed under Graphic Design, websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.