SEO domination on Google
Posted on Dec 22, 2008 by
Paul White
If you want to rank higher on google, you have to focus on
SEO.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It involves designing
websites to maximize search engine referrals. Anyone can build a
website, but to build one with search engines in mind takes alot of
time patience and planning. Here is the list of things I pay attention to when building
websites.
Domain Name
Once its bought you are stuck with it. You can overcome a bad domain with good content, but if you have a domain with specific keywords it will help you rank higher for those keywords. If you can try to get the .com version of the domain you want. This is just for consumers, as they are used to typing in .coms. The search engines don't care what kid of domain you have.
Title Tag
The title tag is the text in the title bar at the top of your window. This is usually followed by - Mozilla Firefox or - Internet Explorer. When it comes to text this is probably the most important text on your page. Keep your title tag relavent to the content of the page. Keep it as short as possible. 5-6 words and no more, and do not repeat words.
Keywords Meta
This block of code lies within your
HTML HEAD. It should have a comma divided list of keywords and phrases that describe the content of your website. Try to make sure these are different on each page, and do not just type the same words over and over again. Try to keep this list down to 20 words or phrases. This will impact ranking on the smaller search engines, but google doesn't care about this Meta Tag
Description Meta
3 or 4 sentances that describe the content of your page all search engines will use this.
Keyword Density and Repetition
IF you take all the words on your page, and then find the most used words, you would have your keyword density for a given word. They say that in order to rank high on google you should have a keyword density for around 2%. On Yahoo and others they say 5%. Your Keyword's density and how many times its used on the page will both contribute to higher ranking. This is one of the reason Wikipedia sites rank so high for just about everything.
Inbound Links
These links are links on other sites that link to a page on your site. Remember page rank is not based on your domain its based on the value of a page's content. You could have a higher page rank on a sub page than your homepage, even though since most people point their links to your homepage this rarely happends. Inbound links help google determine how popular this content is. Not just links but links from other web pages that have similar content are helpful.
Outbound links.
Beliieve it or not, linking to other sites can help your ranking. But be sure the sites you are ranking to are related to the content of your page. If you want proof. Do this. Goto Google. And Search for "i7 workstation". My blog entry is ( as of this posting ) the number 1 entry on google. I created this blog entry upon selecting the components I was going to use for my new workstation off newegg.com I was in a rush so I simply copy pasted my wishlist into my blog entry. All the links pointed back to newegg products. For some reason google feels this entry is very valuable. I did no other link building on this page. I discovered this by Mistake. When I get time I will be sitting down and running lots of analysis on this blog entry to find out why its ranking so high.
Code to Content Ratio
Many in the
SEO world would rather claim that your
HTML markup has no impact on your ranking. I say thats crap. By designing pages based on externally referenced
CSS styling. You remove alot of code from your pages. This increased the content to code ratio. Also by using this technique you can keep your content at the top of your page, and non imporant content at the bottom. Then by using
CSS you can absolutely position your content where you want it to visually appear. Once again many aruge this doesn't work, but I disagrree.
Header Tags
Use these tags sparengly for titles of blocks of text. I usually start all my pages with a H1 at the top with somthing similar to my Title tag. Then I have H2 and H3 tags in the main body of the text.
Image Filenames and Alt Attributes
These are also important. Make sure they are relavent to the image being displayed.
Why do we care so much about Search Engines?
Even though word of mouth can drive traffic to your website. The most important part of website promotion is search engine dominance. By watching your stats you can see if you are increasing the number of Search engine referrals, or not. This is good way to measure your growth and success. Remember most
SEO should already be built into the basic structure of your website. After that what is important is to add quality content.
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