Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips

1) Prepare a list of Marketing Keywords

- Users search for content on search engines by using keywords. If the search keywords match the content of your website, it’s highly likely that your website will be pulled up in the search results list.

- While preparing the list; branding, features of the website, users search keywords, performance of various keywords on various ad networks (Google, Yahoo!, Live, etc.) and contents on the actual pages should be considered.

2) Identify List of pages to Optimize

- Most websites have a large number of pages; it’s difficult to optimize all of them at once. Arranging the pages into a list according to their priority starting from the Home Page, Landing Pages, Marketing pages, Blog and then applying SEO on them in iterations will help.

- We will have to understand that the SEO is not a onetime process and keywords, campaigns and content of the pages should be tweaked continuously as the market trends change and you get feedback about your previous efforts by using tools like Google Analytics, Google Optimizer etc.

3) Create Sitemap

- Most search engines use crawlers to index the pages. If you have a web application which is famous and is well cross linked with other websites on the internet you can probably ignore this step. But for most new websites that is hungry for recognition, the quickest way to let the search engines and thus users know about their presence is by submitting the Sitemap listing the URLs to the various search engines.

- Two main types of Sitemaps should be created

1) HTML Sitemap

- This should be accessible from the home page of the website and should list all the important pages on the website categorized under clear section headers with properly tested hyperlinks. (Hint: Broken hyperlinks affect your reputation and may result in bad user experience)

- Text and Title of the hyperlinks should clearly identify the page they point to, try to keep the Text and Title consistent for the links that point to the same page across the application.

2) XML Sitemap

- Study and finalize a Sitemap format that all major Search providers accept

- Create a sitemap for all the pages on your website and submit them to all the major search providers

Tips:

- Checking for broken and non reachable links by running diagnostics tools on this search provider’s webmaster’s tools is important and reporting the broken links on the search providers’ index will help eliminate dead links being returned as search results

- Keep the sitemaps updated as you make changes to the website

Sitemap generator:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/sitemap-generator.html

4) Create robots.txt

By placing a carefully generated robots.txt file in the website’s root directory you can specify to various bots that crawl through your website to include certain directories and web pages and ignore certain other web pages.

- Before listing your directories in the robots.txt file analyze the risk as this may give any hacker an idea about your directory structure. Writing the robots.txt file in such a way that you give away least information about your directory structure is important.

- Most but not all bots respect the robots.txt file so not allowing certain bots to crawl through your website will save you bandwidth and hosting costs as these bots will try to download and analyze your site content. If you know for sure, which bots do not bring any value to you; you can instruct them not to index your website.

- Make sure you specify in the robots.txt file that none of your dynamically generated pages like Search and Redirect pages get indexed.

5) Create unique, accurate page titles

The title of the page outlines to the users and the search providers the purpose of the page, its underlying content.

- Having brief, Unique and human readable Titles for all pages will help search engines to list results according to user’s search keywords, thus increasing the conversion rate
- While being displayed in a Search Result, the Title will usually appear in the first line of the result. Having a creatively worded Title is desirable.

- Avoid using the same titles for multiple pages. One way to identify which pages use the same or very similar titles is by using the Google’s webmaster tools. The search providers group all the pages with similar titles and present the most relevant page to the user based on the user’s query. Thus by not having unique and content specific Titles you risk hiding certain pages in the search results.

6) Make use of the "description" & Keywords meta tag

A page's description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. A page's description meta tag might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph.

- Description Meta tags are important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages.

- Description meta tag should always summarize the content of the specific page and should not be vague or loaded with keywords not relevant to the page. Meta Description and page content with carefully chosen marketing keywords that appear in user’s queries enhances the page’s chances to appear in the search provider’s results.

- Adding the keywords meta section to the page’s header section with important keywords appearing in the page content also helps pull up your page when search is performed with either of the keywords mentioned in this section.

7) Good practices for anchor text & Images

Hyperlinks

Hyperlinks should always have concise, descriptive text informing the users and search engines about the page they link to.

- Use title attribute of the anchor tag that will provide the search engines information about what the link does, this will also appear as “tooltip” when the user mouses over the link

Images

- Using “ALT” for images not only help improve site’s accessibility for disabled people, it’s also a meaningful place to provide description about the image. Use of relevant keywords in the “ALT” tag will also improve site’s chance to appear in the search results

8) Be aware of rel="nofollow" for links

Setting the value of the "rel" attribute of a link to "nofollow" will tell Google that certain links on your site shouldn't be followed or pass your page's reputation to the pages linked to.
- Make use of “nofollow” at places where the users can enter their own choice of URLs, where you have exposure to link spamming. Not using “nofollow” on these links will suggest that your site is vouching for them and may affect our site rank.

9) Good practices for promoting your website

ü Listing in local business directories

ü Blog about new content or services

ü Don't forget about offline promotion

ü Know about social media sites

10) Analytics and SEO go hand in hand
- Get information about the target audience, demographics, which external sites have links to your site and integrate this information in the SEO campaign.
- Using tools like Google Website Optimizer to continuously get feedback on how change in design, copy or ad campaigns are affecting user experience and thus conversion
- Layouts of important pages like Home Pages or Landing pages should also pass through the user experience tests on Google Website Optimizer instead of wasting time and money on guessing which layout is better

References:

(1) Best resource for SEO

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-seo-starter-guide.html

(2) Google Webmasters: http://google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&cbid=kezv0zk54ica&src=cb&lev=index

(3) Windows Live Webmasters:

http://help.live.com/help.aspx?mkt=en-us&project=wl_webmasters

(4) Yahoo Search Content Quality Guidelines

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/basics/basics-18.html

(5) Blog

http://searchengineland.com/21-essential-seo-tips-techniques-11580

(6) Webinar: Google Trifecta for your website (Google Webmaster, Analytics, Google Optimizer)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yKjrdcC8wA