Short Guide for Long term Natural SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Why should we do search engine optimization for a website?

Search Engine Optimization refers to a set of techniques that are used to improve the visibility of a website in search engine listings, which primarily are related to optimized keyword phrases widely used by net surfers to search for information, service or products. These techniques may focus upon improving the structure of a web page, use of keyword phrases, building links for search engine ranking and more and to make the website search engine friendly.

Steps to be followed while optimizing a website to make it search engine friendly

Web site analysis: As an initial step the existing web site should be analyzed and restructured for search engine compatibility.

Web site Validation: All pages should be written in valid HTML or XHTML, each page can be validated online on W3C website http://validator.w3.org

Web Page files Renaming: Rename file and folders according to optimized keywords.
Example: www.yourdomain.com/jobs/finance_jobs_australia.htm, in this “finance jobs Australia” is the optimized keyword.

CSS and JavaScript: Present the web pages using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and JavaScript. Note that CSS and java script should be stored as an external file.

Optimized Titles: Use optimised keywords related to your business or domain as titles. The titles should not exceed 64 characters.

Meta Tags: Each page should have unique set of keywords and description stored as metadata. Some search engines use Meta tags as a contributing factor to page ranking and some don’t. META description tag should be a well-written summary of the page intended at the website visitors rather than the search engine. It should not be longer than 250 characters. META keywords tag should contain the most important keywords/keyword phrases.

Content Optimization: Optimized content should be in the first 100-200 words on the page as they are regarded as very important by the search engines. The keyword-group-oriented-content should be concentrated in this area. Home page is an extremely important page as this is what is usually submitted to the search engines. Normally this is the starting point for search engine spidering.

In addition to the basic content development as cited above the home page should be attributed with more relevant keywords. The home page crafted in this manner will be fit for optimization as it contains a balanced set of keyword groups and would prove to be far more powerful in search engine promotion as against a set of images with no alt attributes.

Site Map and Alt tags: The site map should be at the start of each web page, including the home page, and should be one the first links on all the pages. Preferably use text links rather than image links. If you are using image links, specify descriptive alt attribute. The easiest way to see if the images have alt tags is to switch off the images in the browser and see if the text is shown in place of the image.

Navigations and Breadcrumb: The main website navigation links should be made available at the head and foot of each web page. If possible add appropriate breadcrumb trail to each page, preferably at the top of the page. This will give you more internal links. For Example – Song Name>Artist\Band Name>Gender> Age range> search results.

Head Tag and Div: Each web page should be structured using structural mark-up such as headings (<H1> to <H6>) and paragraphs (<P>). The headings should be meaningful and should include keywords. Minimise the use of <TABLE> tags, instead use <DIV> and <UL><LI> tags. This will minimise the code base, make the content more directly available and uncluttered, as well minimise coding errors arising from unclosed tags and improperly nested tables.

Robots: Make sure you have a robots.txt file in the root of your web server. This will tell the search engines to index your site and which pages they should index. Well-behaved spiders will always check this file first. META robots tag is used to tell search engines which pages they should index.

Standard robot text file are as follows:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Error page or 404 pages: Custom Error pages can be used to redirect the user to your homepage or a sitemap in the event of a dead link. This will keep them on the site rather than assuming that you are no longer in the business. For ASP pages this can be done using IIS and PHP pages using .htaccess file.

Competitor analysis: Analysis should be done to find out right keyword competitor use and to find out better keyword phrases that can target website by customers and prospects.

Keyword analysis and research: The right keywords for optimization and their popularity can be found using free tools like overture and wordtracker trial version.

Keyword density: The density of the optimized keywords in the content should be analyzed forehand. The permissible density is 2% to 8%. You will be able to find the density for keywords using the online tool http://www.gorank.com

Link Building and popularity: Inbound links, links from other websites to your website are extremely important. To increase the inbound links and make the link popularity figure higher you should consider exchanging links with sites with higher page ranking. To add links Identify link directories, Free engine submissions and Affiliate/Partner/Supplier Reciprocal Links. Summarily link popularity can be achieved by increasing inbound links.

Web Site Monitoring: Most visited web pages, Log analysis referrers, search terms that can be found based on the stats report. This can be viewed by configuring stat like Stat counter, web stat and Google analytics. For optimized Keyword positions in search engines (SERPs) Search Engine Result Pages should be monitored. Web site page rank can be found using Google tool bar.