Basic Tips: Optimize Your Blog For Search Engines

Optmize Your Blog for Search EnginesEvery day Search Engines like Google send many millions of web users to websites in their index. While there are plenty of Web 2.0 web indexing services around that are increasing in popularity – the fact is that search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN are still the biggest source of traffic to websites on the web.

As a result – learning how to be indexed and ranked well by them seems like a no brainer.

URL Optimize:

  • Search engines and visitors can interact with your website more affectively when you use URLs that describe the pages content (for example: http://www.company.com/companyinformation).
  • URLs are extremely vital to your SEO campaign. Be sure to use URLs that make it easy for Google™ to index your site.

Title Optimize:

  • Keep your titles concise and make sure they contain your best keywords.
  • Each page should have its own exclusive title.
  • Featured tool: Here’s a snippet-optimizer that allows you to see how your titles look on Google™ and other search results.

Meta Description Optmize:

  • Meta descriptions are useful because they often dictate how your pages are shown in search results.
  • For optimum effectiveness, meta descriptions should be 70-160 characters long.
  • Your meta descriptions should be concise and contain your best keywords.
  • Make sure each page of your website has its own meta description.

Meta Keywords Optimize:

  • Meta keywords are words or phrases that pertain to your site’s content. In the past, people have tried to take advantage of this tag so now it doesn’t affect your search rankings the way that it used to.

Heading Tags Optimize:

  • You can include keywords in your headings.
  • The initial heading (<H1>) should include your best keywords.
  • Using only one <H1> heading per page will strengthen your SEO.

Images Optimize:

  • Adding ALT text to your images so that it’s easier for search engines to index them.
  • Search engines don’t physically see images the way people do. ALT text is an option that allows you to specifically describe the image.
  • ALT text attaches a description to your pictures so that they show up in Google™ and other search engine’s image results.
  • Make sure your website images have their own specific ALT text.
  • To find out how to assign ALT text to your images, click here.
  • Keep in mind that your pages load time will vary based on the number and size of your images. Try your best to keep it low.

Text/HTML Ratio:

  • You can strengthen your SEO by increasing the recurrence of keywords on your page and adding more text that pertains to your website’s content.

Robots.txt File:

  • This file restricts the activity of search engine crawlers and stops them from accessing certain pages and directories.
  • A robots.txt file also locates the XML sitemap.
  • To check your robots.txt file for syntax errors, Click Here.

XML Sitemaps:

  • A XML sitemap lists URLs that can be crawled and may offer other information such as how often you update, when your last update occurred and importance.
  • With an XML sitemap, search engines can index your website more accurately.
  • Although it’s been debated, we suggest that you submit an XML sitemap to Google™ Webmasters Tools.

Language:

  • You should declare the contents language in the HTML code of each page.
  • You should also declare the language code in the URL (for example: company.com/es/contact.html).
  • If you plan on building a multilingual site, refer to the tips found Here.

Doctype:

  • Specifying a doctype assists your web browser in correctly rendering your content.

Encoding:

  • Declaring a character/language encoding will significantly strengthen your SEO. It also prevents complication when rendering special characters.

Google™ Analytics:

Microformats:

  • Microformat is a markup that is used to structure the data that is being sent to search engines more effectively.
  • The presentation of Google’s search results is always improving due to Microformats.

Dublin Core:

  • Dublin Core is a set of metadata standards that describe your websites content.

Geo Meta Tags:

RSS Feeds:

  • Blogs and news websites depend on feeds.
  • Your websites visibility improves when subscribers to your feed are alerted of content updates.
  • Tip: FeedBurner provides custom RSS feeds and management tools for web-based publishers as well as bloggers and podcasters.

Favicon:

  • Ensure that your favicon reflects your brand.
  • Featured tip: If you want a better experience for your visitors, have a look at this great favicon.

Gzip Compression:

  • You can boost the speed of your website by using Gzip.

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