For your web site pages, you must consider optimizing the following elements in every page. The elements are sorted by importance (at least in my opinion).
Page title is the most important element, you must not have duplicate titles in your entire site or the Search Engines will be wondering which page should rank for that title. Every page must have its title, headers, and content to be considered different by search engines.
In the next coming weeks, I will be writing about these elements to help you in your SEO process.
Off page optimization is by far the most important aspect in SEO. Off page SEO mainly refer to the number and quality of back links pointing at your web site.
To make it clear, you will NOT rank without high quality back links for any competitive keyword. Some websites gain natural links since people find these websites useful, probably for their content or for free tools they provide. However, majority of web sites do not get back links naturally, in that case, you really need to start link building campaign.
Link building! What is that? It is the process of gaining links from other web sites to your home page and to your sub pages (deep links). Will any link from any web site be useful? No.Your links should be from related web sites, with decent page rank.
Can I buy 1000 domains, and link to my site from each of them? Thats quite useless. Links from Page Rank zero domain is quite useless.
How can I gain links? There are enormous number of techniques that I will start blogging about to help you to rank.
Link building techniques include:
- buying links
- Web directories submission
- Link exchange with partners
- Article submission
- Leave insightful comments on blogs
- Press releases
- Social bookmarking
I will write about the quality of link in the next few days in details. Then, I will explain in details, how to gain links using different techniques that will help your ranking.
Your HTML document should have a proper structure. A proper structure is defined by W3C here. All what you need to do regarding your page structure is to choose a proper page header and place it on your page as h1 element. Then develop a hierarchy for your page content and you may consider using h2, h3, etc. for each paragraph. That will make it easier for your readers to find what they are looking for, they need to look at the headers or sub headers, and read the paragraph beneath it. Search engines just like your readers will also find the page easier to understand and categorize.
I recommend you to place each paragraph with its header (h2 or h3) in html div, give the div an id, and then place few links in the top of the page that points to each sub header in your page. That will make it much more easier for your readers to navigate within your pages, and search engines will appreciate it.
It may sounds so silly to mention such things. From my experience by looking and evaluating web sites, i strongly believe that 80% or more of the web sites I looked at do a very bad job in structuring their pages.
As you noticed, I believe that the better you make the page for users, the more chance you have to rank. No one told me that, but I am quite sure that is true.
Click depth is the number of clicks a user needs to click from a site home page to reach a page. Click depth has to do with ranking for almost all search engines. The more the user needs to click to reach a page, the harder he can find the page. Search engines consider this in some way in their scoring algorithms.
You should try to have your site navigation as easy as possible not only for search engine’s sake but also for user experience. You may consider having a site map with good hierarchy to help your users and search engine to find any page on your site easily. In case you have an enormous number of pages, you need to be careful when picking a pagination schema. The lower the number of clicks a user needs to click, the better for user experience and for SEO.
It is worth to mention that click depth is not related to where you save your files in your server. That is, if you store a file 10 folders deep in your server and you access it by one click, thats much better than storing it in the site root and the user needs to do 2 or more clicks to find it.
Your page URL is one of the important factors that you must consider during your SEO process. This factor is not only a factor that has to do with rank for few keywords, this factor (URL) may disallow your page from being indexed by Google!
Search engines feel scary from query parameters since it is easy to get their crawlers stuck crawling few pages with just changing query parameter value dynamically. Google says that a URL that has more than three query parameters may not be indexed. They may index URLs with more query parameters but thats not often. Thus, in your site SEO, you have to avoid query parameters. If you are an online retailer and your product page URL looks like:
/products.php?id=12321&session_id=12121&page=3&name=freezer
You may need to consider restructure your site by rewriting your URLs. I will post later about URL rewriting using Mod_Rewrite. You may consider different URL structures that do not have query parameters like:
/products/Freezer/3
Are you wondering if that will really make difference? Believe me, it makes. Sites that uses query parameters a lot might not get indexed.
Finally, getting rid from query parameters and replacing them with keywords will have real impact on your keywords rank. Given a product, let us say, Microwave in your online retailing site with ID= 32, let us compare two simple URL structures:
1) /products?product_id=32
Versus
2) /products/Microwave
The second URL structure will improve your rank for keywords related to Microwave since search engines will not relate the ID “32″ to your site content.
To summarize, you really need to avoid query parameters. You should try to build keyword rich virtual URL structure for your site. Building a keyword rich URL is not going to be easy, i will write later how to build a router in php to help you to create virtual and keyword rich URLs.
Page title is by far the most important element in your page. We as humans may not read the html page title, we may look at images or body tag and try to scan the document fast. The way humans build knowledge is different than they way search engines do, and this is why you may not agree with me about title tag importance for search engine optimization. If I were to give weights to the importance of the title tag versus all other on page factors, I would say it is about 60-70%. You need to select good titles for your web site pages.
What is a good title? Evey title you select may increase or decrease your web page rank in SERP for many keywords. But, there are few recommendations that you may consider:
- Use specific titles, do not use generic keywords. For example, if you create a new blog about cars, and you write a page with a title “cars”, you will not get rank of 100000, since you choose very generic title and millions of people wrote about it before many years and they already gained many of back links. However, if you choose title like “car trunk maintenance”, you may rank since you have much more specific keywords. However, if you have a site that has numerous number of back links, you may consider targeting general keywords, but it is not going to be easy. I will post later about general vs specific keywords, which also corresponds to high traffic versus low traffic keywords.
- Your entire site must not have duplicate titles. Every page must have its own title, meta tags, headers, and body. Search engines hate duplicate content whether inside your site or whether outside your site.
- Before you select your title, do keyword research. You may consider visiting overture and do few searches. For keyword like “cars”, overture says that more than 3 millions searches were performed for it last month. Overture also gives you many related keywords that you may consider in your site. FYI, overture gets information from Yahoo, Google does not make this data available, but the search giant may get double these numbers.
- Your title must be related to your page header (usually inside h1 field) and content. It will not make any sense for search engine if your page title is “car maintenance” and your header is “watermelon”.
I want to end this post by saying that it is really very hard to predict the success of a specific title. Specially when your site is dynamically generated and most your page have same pattern for title like product pages in shopping cart site. You always need to do some keyword research and measure keywords competitiveness (i will write later about measuring keywords competitiveness in details) and then you need to try your titles. Remember, you need to let search engines crawl your site fully once you change your titles, give it one or two months and then judge if the titles were good or bad, do not judge fast.
Having a web site that is highly optimized for search engines is very important for your online business success. People usually go to search engines when they are looking for products or services. Getting your site in the top of results in search engine result pages (SERP) going to make big difference in your sales.
To give very general view of how search engine work, search engines consider two big factors in ranking your site among all other sites. These factors can be classified into on-page and off-page factors.
On-page factors are your web page elements like the page title, meta tags, headers, styles and many more. Off-page factors are concerned with the back links and the age of the domain. Back links are the hyper links from other websites pointing to your pages.