Website SEO – An Overview From An Expert
Where to begin? Search engine optimization can cover so many different aspects and to go into detail will take a very long time. What I am going to do is cover the most important aspects here and if you need more information on specific areas then please use the category links on the right hand sidebar.
The reason why I class myself as a website seo expert is because I have been in this field for 6 years now and I keep a very close eye on what googles does when it tweaks or up dates its algorithm. Google makes about 300 tweaks a year and roughly releases 1-2 big updates a year so its important to stay on top of what happens. My main piece of advice is don’t try any craphat techniques also known as blackhat techniques as it isn’t worth it and you will benefit more from having a clean google/user friendly site. Basic seo isn’t that hard but the more in depth seo can cause problems and should be left to an expert.
Lets start right at the very beginning when you are just about to start your online ventures before you have even bought your domain name and created a site layout.
Domain names can have a noticeable affect on where you rank for your main keyword if you use it as the domain name itself. Not everyone wants to use there keyword as there website url which is perfectly fine and understandable but you will have to put in slightly more work to rank for that keyword which wont be a problem. Before you buy your domain you need to think about where you want to market your product, this example will assume you have a product to sell rather than a service ect. Most people that sell products online target a certain market/country like America or Uk so you should base your domain purchase on which country you want to target as each country as a specific extension. For example if you wanted to sell your product in the uk you would buy a .co.uk domain as that will help you rank well in the regional search engine i.e google.co.uk.
If you do want to target the Uk then you should rent/buy a server in the Uk as google uses the server ip address aswell as domain extensions to workout which country that website is being hosted. Google is known for its relevant search results and google will use the information it gathers about where your website is based to display your pages to the relevant/right regional search engine. So for example if you were to search for kitchen taps in google you would want it to display results from suppliers in your country first. You could also set a geographical meta tag just to confirm again which countries you want to focus on targeting but its not important as the other two points have a much bigger impact.
Once you have your domain and hosting sorted you then want to work on a website layout/design. Most people use a generic website store front/script if they are selling loads of products but personally I recommend getting one built by someone who knows a lot about seo as you target is to have a google friendly site and most store fronts/scripts have seo issues. You could always use a script and then work on making it more seo and google friendly, which is easy if you know what your doing.
Once you have your nice clean website you should build a sitemap and not necessarily submit it to google webmaster tools straight away but you could add a link to it from one of your top level pages. Even if you haven’t optimized your pages for keyterms yet the sooner google indexes your site the better. If you have a google friendly site then all your urls should be in the same format, not only that but your urls should be google friendly so they display the page title rather than a number based on what page that product happened to be created. If you site is google friendly then there is no problem in having a sitemap created and indexable from your site, you still might want to wait until you have optimized your site for keywords before submitting it to googles webmaster tools section.
Spend time researching your keywords and finding out the search volumes and how competitive your niche is. Lets say for this example you want to promote the term kitchen taps, we will focus on just the one term to keep this example brief and easy to read, you should then be able to work on the techniques to promote multiple terms but remember to keep everything user friendly as well as google friendly. So we have our main keyterm kitchen taps what we wont to do is optimize a webpage for that term. When you have picked your webpage try to have the keyterm in the url so for example domain/kitchen-taps.php if you are optimizing your homepage then this isn’t a problem just carry on reading. You should then add you keyterm in a sentence to display as the webpage title so you would add this in-between the title tags <title> Sentence</title> , this give google a good idea a to what that particular webpage is about.
Once you have your title tag sorted you should then try to use the keyterm in a <h></h> tag as google still gives weight to the terms/words within them. When the internet first really took off and google started dominating the scene there were many tags which you could use to optimise your site but now google has dropped a few and doesn’t really assign much weight to some others. Title tags and heading tags still hold a lot of weight which means google takes notice of what’s in-between each tag and should be used to promote terms on every page you make.
Another on-page seo technique which you should keep in mind when creating your site is the internal link structure. As well as making your site user friendly and easy to navigate you should do the same for google. Label all links appropriately and use keyterms as the anchor text where possible. A good internal link structure makes life easy for google and will help greatly in optimizing your site. All internal links should have the same url format and should promote the main keyword of that page.
Most websites naturally have pictures and logos to make the site look more attractive and professional. A google technique is to assign title tags to the image so when google crawls your site it will see that you have images relevant to your content. The title and alt tags used in an image tag are becoming more popular and are still widely used by a lot of seo experts.