Step By Step Page Optimization

Starting at the top of your index/home page something like this:
(After your logo or header graphic)

1) A heading tag that includes a keyword(s) or keyword phrases. A heading tag is bigger and bolder text than normal body text, so a search engine places more importance on it because you emphasize it.

2) Heading sizes range from h1 - h6 with h1 being the largest text. If you learn to use just a little Cascading Style Sheet code you can control the size of your headings. You could set an h1 sized heading to be only slightly larger than your normal text if you choose, and the search engine will still see it as an important heading.

3) Next would be an introduction that describes your main theme. This would include several of your top keywords and keyword phrases. Repeat your top 1 or 2 keywords several times, include other keyword search terms too, but make it read in sentences that makes sense to your visitors.

4) A second paragraph could be added that got more specific using other words related to online education.

5) Next you could put smaller heading.

6) Then you'd list the links to your pages, and ideally have a brief decision of each link using keywords and keyword phrases in the text. You also want to have several pages of quality content to link to. Repeat that procedure for all your links that relate to your theme.

7) Next you might include a closing, keyword laden paragraph. More is not necessarily better when it comes to keywords, at least after a certain point. Writing "online education" fifty times across your page would probably result in you being caught for trying to cheat. Ideally, somewhere from 3% - 20% of your page text would be keywords. The percentage changes often and is different at each search engine. The 3-20 rule is a general guideline, and you can go higher if it makes sense and isn't redundant.

8) Finally, you can list your secondary content of book reviews, humor, and links. Skip the descriptions if they aren't necessary, or they may water down your theme too much. If you must include descriptions for these non-theme related links, keep them short and sweet.

You also might include all the other site sections as simply a link to another index that lists them all. You could call it Entertainment, Miscellaneous, or whatever. These can be sub-indexes that can be optimized toward their own theme, which is the ideal way to go.

Now you've set the all important top of your page up with a strong theme. So far so good, but this isn't the only way you can create a strong theme so don't be compelled into following this exact formula. This was just an example to show you one way to set up a strong site theme. Use your imagination, you many come up with an even better way.

 
One Site – One Theme

It's important to note that you shouldn't try to optimize your home page for more than one theme. They just end up weakening each other's strength when you do that. By using simple links to your alternative content, a link to your humor page can get folks where they want to go, and then you can write your humor page as a secondary index optimized toward a humor theme. In the end, each page should be optimized for search engines for the main topic of that page or site section.

Search engine optimization is made up of many simple techniques that work together to create a comprehensive overall strategy. This combination of techniques is greater as a whole than the sum of the parts. While you can skip any small technique that is a part of the overall strategy, it will subtract from the edge you'd gain by employing all the tactics.

Affiliate Sites & Dynamic URLs

In affiliate programs, sites that send you traffic and visitors, have to be paid on the basis of per click or other parameters (such as number of pages visited on your site, duration spent, transactions etc). Most common contractual understanding revolves around payment per click or click throughs.

Affiliates use tracking software that monitors such clicks using a redirection measurement system. The validity of affiliate programs in boosting your link analysis is doubtful. Nevertheless, it is felt that it does not actually do any harm.

It does provide you visitors, and that is important. In the case of some search engines re-directs may even count in favor of your link analysis. Use affiliate programs, but this is not a major strategy for optimization.

Several pages in e-commerce and other functional sites are generated dynamically and have “?” or “&” sign in their dynamic URLs. These signs separate the CGI variables.

While Google will crawl these pages, many other engines will not. One inconvenient solution is to develop static equivalent of the dynamic pages and have them on your site.

Another way to avoid such dynamic URLs is to rewrite these URLs using a syntax that is accepted by the crawler and also understood as equivalent to the dynamic URL by the application server.

The Amazon site shows dynamic URLs in such syntax. If you are using Apache web server, you can use Apache rewrite rules to enable this conversion.

One good tip is that you should prepare a crawler page (or pages) and submit this to the search engines. This page should have no text or content except for links to all the important pages that you wished to be crawled.

When the spider reaches this page it would crawl to all the links and would suck all the desired pages into its index. You can also break up the main crawler page into several smaller pages if the size becomes too large. The crawler shall not reject smaller pages, whereas larger pages may get bypassed if the crawler finds them too slow to be spidered.

You do not have to be concerned that the result may throw up this “site-map” page and would disappoint the visitor. This will not happen, as the “site-map” has no searchable content and will not get included in the results, rather all other pages would.

We found the site wired.com had published hierarchical sets of crawler pages. The first crawler page lists all the category headlines, these links lead to a set of links with all story headlines, which in turn lead to the news stories.

Page Size Can Be A Factor

We have written above that the spiders may bypass long and “difficult” pages. They would have their own time-out characteristics or other controls that help them come unstuck from such pages. So you do not want to have such a page become your “gateway” page. One tip is to keep the page size below 100 kb.

How many Pages To Submit?

You do not have to submit all the pages of your site. As stated earlier, many sites have restrictions on the number of pages you submit.

A key page or a page that has links to many inner pages is ideal, but you must submit some inner pages. This insures that even if the first page is missed, the crawler does get to access other pages and all the important pages through them. Submit your key 3 to 4 pages at least.

Choose the ones that have the most relevant content and keywords to suit your target search string and verify that they link to other pages properly.

Should You Use Frames?

Many websites make use of frames on their web pages. In some cases, more than two frames would be used on a single web page. The reason why most websites use frames is because each frame’s content has a different source.

A master page known as a “frameset” controls the process of clubbing content from different sources into a single web page. Such frames make it easier for webmasters to club multiple sources into a single web page.

This, however, has a huge disadvantage when it comes to Search Engines. Some of the older Search Engines do not have the capability to read content from frames.

These only crawl through the frameset instead of all the web pages. Consequently web pages with multiple frames are ignored by the spider. There are certain tags known as “NOFRAMES” (Information ignored by frames capable browser) that can be inserted in the HTML of these web pages.

Spiders are able to read information within the NOFRAMES tags. Thus, Search Engines only see the Frameset. Moreover, there cannot be any links to other web pages in the NOFRAMES blocks.

That means the search engines won't crawl past the frameset, thus ignoring all the content rich web pages that are controlled by the frameset.

Hence, it is always advisable to have web pages without frames as these could easily make your website invisible to Search Engines.

Making Frames Visible To Search Engines

We discussed earlier the prominence of frames based websites. Many amateur web designers do not understand the drastic effects frames can have on search engine visibility.

Such ignorance is augmented by the fact that some Search Engines such as Google and Ask.com are actually frames capable. Ask.com spiders can crawl through frames and index all web pages of a website. However, this is only true for a few Search Engines.

The best solution as stated above is to avoid frames all together.  If you still decide to use frames another remedy to this problem is using Javascript. Javascript can be added anywhere and is visible to Search Engines.

These would enable spiders to crawl to other web pages, even if they do not recognize frames.

With a little trial and error, you can make your frame sites accessible to both types of search engines.

<< Previous    1...   4  5  6  [7]  8    Next >>