When it comes to SEO not all of us have the time to be
experts. At some point the real "gurus" of SEO and other topics are
the people with a whole lot of time on their hands. This list drives home some
absolutely crucial points that you should keep in mind when optimizing your
pages for valuable search rankings.
Check Search Engine Crawl Error Pages
It's important to monitor search engine crawl errors reports to keep on top
of how your site and its pages are performing. Monitoring error reports can
help you determine when and where Googlebot or another crawler is having trouble
indexing your content - which can help you find a solution to the problem.
Create/update robots.txt and sitemap files
These files are supported by major search engines and are incredibly useful
tools for ensuring that crawlers index your important site content while avoiding
those sections/files that you deem to be either unimportant or cause problems
in the crawl process. In many cases we've seen the proper use of these files
make all the difference between a total crawl failure for a site and a full
index of content pages which makes them crucial from an SEO standpoint.
Check Googlebot activity reports
These reports allow you to monitor how long it's taking Googlebot to access
your pages. This information can be very important if you are worried that you
may be on a slow network or experiencing web server problems. If it is taking
search engine crawlers a long time to index your pages it may be the case that
there are times when they "time out"and stop trying. Additionally,
if the crawlers are unable to call your pages up quickly there is a good chance
users are experiencing the same lag in load times, and we all know how impatient
internet users can be.
Check how your site looks to browsers without image and JavaScript support
One of the best ways to determine just what your site looks like to a search
engine crawler is to view your pages in a browser with image and JavaScript
support disabled. Mozilla's Firefox browser has a plug-in available called the
"Web Developer Toolbar" that adds this functionality and a lot more
to the popular standards-compliant browser. If after turning off image and JavaScript
support you aren't able to make sense of your pages at all it is a good sign
that your site is not well-optimized for search. While images and JavaScript
can add a lot to the user experience they should always be viewed as a "luxury"
- or simply an improvement upon an already-solid textual content base.
Ensure that all navigation is in HTML, not images
One of the most common mistakes in web design is to use images for site navigation.
While for some companies and webmasters SEO is not a concern and therefore they
can get away with this for anyone worried about having well-optimized pages
this should be the first thing to go. Not only will it render your site navigation
basically valueless for search engine crawlers, but within reason very similar
effects can usually be achieved with CSS roll-overs that maintain the aesthetic
impact while still providing valuable and relevant link text to search engines.
Check that all images include ALT text
Failing to include descriptive ALT text with images is to miss out on another
place to optimize your pages. Not only is this important for accessibility for
vision-impaired users, but search engines simply can't "take a look"
at your images and decipher the content there. They can only see your ALT text,
if you've provided it, and the associates they'll make with the image and your
relevant content will be based exclusively on this attribute.
Use Flash content sparingly
Several years ago Flash hit the scene and spread like wild fire. It was neat
looking, quick to download and brought interactivity and animation on the web
to a new height. However, from an SEO standpoint Flash files might as well be
spacer GIFs - they're empty. Search engines are not able to index text/content
within a Flash file. For this reason, while Flash can do a lot for presentation,
from an accessibility and SEO standpoint it should be used very sparingly and
only on non-crucial content.
Ensure that each page has a unique < title > and meta description
tag
Optimization of < title > tags is one of the most important on-page SEO
points. Many webmasters are apparently unaware and use either duplicate <
title > tags for multiple pages or do not target search traffic at all within
this valuable tag. Run a search on a competitive keyword of your choice on Google
- click on the first few links that show up and see what text appears in the
title bar for the window. You should see right away that this is a key place
to include target keywords for your pages.
Make sure that important page elements are HTML
The simple fact to keep in mind when optimizing a page is that the crawlers
are basically only looking at your source code. Anything you've put together
in a Flash movie, an image or any other multimedia component is likely to be
invisible to search engines. With that in mind it should be clear that the most
important elements of your page, where the heart of your content will lie, should
be presented in clean, standards-compliant and optimized HTML source code.
Be sure to target keywords in your page content
Some webmasters publish their pages in hopes that they will rank well for competitive
keywords within their topic or niche. However, this will simply never happen
unless you include your target keywords in the page content. This means creating
well-optimized content that mentions these keywords frequently without triggering
spam filters. Any way you cut it you're going to need to do some writing - if
you don't like doing it yourself it's a good idea to hire a professional copy
writer. Simply put: without relevant content that mentions your target keywords
you will not rank well.
Don't use frames
There is still some debate as to whether frames are absolutely horrible for
SEO or whether they are simply just not the best choice. Is there really a difference?
Either way, you probably don't want to use frames. Crawlers can have trouble
getting through to your content and effectively indexing individual pages, for
one thing. For another, most functionalities that the use of frames allows is
easily duplicated using proper CSS coding. There is still some use for a frames-based
layout, but it is still better to avoid it if at all possible.
Make sure that your server is returning a 404 error code for unfound
pages
We've all seen it. We're browsing around at a new or familiar site, clicking
links and reading content, when we get the infamous blank screen that reads
"404 page not found" error. While broken links that point to these
pages should definitely be avoided you also don't want to create a "custom
error page" to replace this page. Why? Well, it's simple: if you generate
a custom error page crawlers can spend time following broken links that they
won't know are broken. A 404 error page is easily recognizable, and search engine
crawlers are programmed to stop following links that generate this page. If
crawlers end up in a section of your site that is down through an old link that
you missed they might not spend the time to index the rest of your site.
Ensure that crawlers will not fall into infinite loops
Many webmasters see fit to include scripting languages, such as PERL, PHP and
ASP to add interactive functionality to their web pages. Whether for a calendar
system, a forum, eCommerce functionality for an online store, etc. scripting
is used quite frequently on the internet. However, what some webmasters don't
realize is that unless they use robots.txt files or take other preventative
measures search engine crawlers can fall into what are called "infinite
loops" in their pages. Imagine, if you will, a script that allows a webmaster
to add a calendar to one of his pages. Now, any programmer worth his salt would
base this script on calculations - it would auto-generate each page based on
the previous month and a formula to determine how the days and dates would fall.
That script, depending on sophistication, could plausibly extend infinitely
into the past or future. Now think of the way a crawler works - it follows links,
indexes what it finds, and follows more links. What's to stop a crawler from
clicking "next month" in a calendar script an infinite number of times?
Nothing - well, almost nothing. Crawlers are well-built programs that need to
run efficiently. As such they are built to recognize when they've run into an
"infinite loop" situation like this, and they will simply stop indexing
pages at a site that is flagged for this error.
I
have been trained to cover much, much more.....
I look forward to helping you with your website!
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