Folks, Today I’m going to discuss about some of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips and tricks. SEO is all about fetching up top-spots in SERPs i.e. Search Engine Result Pages.
Now-a-days, Internet has made such a huge impact on our lives, be it in terms of Knowledge, Business, Entertainment, Information etc. Everyday, multi-thousands new websites are launched on the Internet, and so the competition is increasing exponentially. People generally head to Search Engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask etc. (too many to mention in here), and rely on the results generated by them based on the query made by the user. Thus, every website-owner wants his/her website to appear on top of Search Engine Result Pages generated relevant to the context of the website, and most-importantly, above their rival competitors on every relevant keyword combination or search queries. These days, Search Engines are so powerful, and their search algorithms are so strong, that most of the users are satisfied with the first two pages of the Search Results generated, with Top-4 entries on the very first page receiving most of the Traffic hits. Even I don’t go beyond 2-3 pages of Search Results for almost 90% of my search queries, and I’m sure neither do you (or most of you).
So, If you are a website-owner or webmaster, I’m going to discuss few of the SEO tricks to make your website Search Engine Friendly (SEF). Search Engines are very specific about deciding the rank of your webpages, based on certain criteria. SEO is a very vast topic. Its actually an entire subject in itself, so it is very difficult to explain everything about it in a single article. Hence, I divided it into few Parts, with each subsequent part extending it further to a next level. Following are the few points, which should be considered while developing a website. “The more SEO tactics you apply on your website, the more SEF it would be, and higher it would show up on SERPs – The S-S-S Rule (Triple S)”.
- It is recommended to have Search Engine Friendly URLs, i.e. URLs which are easy to read and share, like the one on this blog. Though most of the Search Engines don’t see that as a necessity, and don’t generally consider it as an SEO tactic, but some do look into the links for the queried keywords to provide the user with the best results. Generally, data-driven websites, developed using Server side scripting languages such as PHP, ASP.Net etc. uses symbols like ‘?’, ‘=’, ‘&’ etc. in the links to pass the data values among pages. This also makes it hard to memorize them, and so its a good practice to have SEF URLs.
- Always give the utmost priority to the content of the page. The main content of the pages is the most keyword-enriched part of the website, and search engines usually look into the main content while indexing them for search queries. Make it as clear, visible, and above all other non-important things as possible. Always use heading tags to represent headings, or sub-headings within your content.
- Avoid duplicate content. Search Engine crawlers are very smart, and they keep track of whether the content being indexed from a website, is already present in their result pages cache, indexed from some other websites. Thus, if duplicate content is found, they generally have a negative impact on your SERPs. Hence, always generate Unique content, and articles for your websites. Never copy it as it is (without prior notification or link-back to the original author) from other websites. Most of the blogs tend to have same content on many pages, like an article content maybe present on the Index page, and its own dedicated page, under the same domain name itself. This is also considered as duplicate content by the crawlers. But, this can be avoided by using the ‘canonical’ meta tag, as I’m using it for this blog (within the <HEAD> tag).
- Use Javascripts, AJAX, and Flash for non-important content only. Search engines can’t read/index the scripts or objects, or get pass through them. Hence, it is recommended to avoid as much of these as possible especially for the content part, bearing keyword-enriched text.
- The page TITLE tag should not contain more than 60 characters, or it would be cut-off by most of the search engines. Its the first thing Search Engines look for based on the user queries, to match the entered keywords with the keywords used in the title tag, in order to display the appropriate result pages. Always use keywords in your title tag, with most important ones at the start.
- Use of ‘Keywords’ and ‘Description’ meta tags is also recommended. Though, major Search Engines like Google etc. don’t consider the ‘Keywords’ meta tag, some of them do. Hence, it is a good practice to include these two meta tags with 5-10 Keywords, and 160 characters maximum Description size respectively.
- Search Engine crawlers can’t read graphical content, or images present on a website. But, they do have the tendency to index them separately based on their textual meaning represented with ‘ALT’ attribute for images present inside <IMG> tag, along with the text present around the image. Hence, use of meaningful, and relevant ALT attribute for images ensure that your images will also get indexed by Search Engines, who have the capability to show Image search results, like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.
This concludes PART-1. But, I’d like to clear one thing right now. End-results never appear that quickly on applying SEO tactics to a website, as some of you might be thinking. It usually takes time for Search Engines to index your website pages on a regular basis, and to note such differences being made to them. It also depends upon your website popularity, and how often its being indexed.
Stay tuned for more…