SEO Guidelines for Small Business
This document will guide you
through the process of developing a new Web site (or updating an existing one)
that is fully optimized for search engine rankings. The higher your Web site is
located on the search engine results pages, the more likely your business is to
obtain sales. Search Engines go to considerable effort to rank pages according
to what Web users find more relevant and appealing. Therefore, following a SEO
guideline not only increases your rank on search engine results pages, but also
generally makes your Web site more organized and compelling to visitors.
Introduction
The 3 major search engines are Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft
which cover 55%, 22% and 10% of the market, respectively. While each search
engine evaluates Web sites in a slightly different way, the factors they
consider in ranking sites are all essentially the same. Therefore, following
the best practices in this guide will optimize your Web site across the board.
You should never forget,
however, that the ultimate purpose of your Web site is to convince people to buy
a product or service that you provide. A Web site that has utilized SEO
techniques to an extreme may rank highly in the search engines, but may not be
appealing to potential customers.
Search Engines have a vast
number of computer programs called ‘bots’ or ‘spiders’. These constantly navigate
the Web, going from page to page by following links, and save the text and
links of all the pages they reach in a master index.
The search engine then ranks the
Web pages against the keywords that users enter in a search query. Each search
engine has its own proprietary algorithm that weighs on-the-page and off-the
page factors on your Web site. As has been mentioned, while the relative weight
of these factors varies by search engine, the factors themselves do not and are
as follows:
I. On-the-page Factors (Page
Content)
a. How well the content on the
page, the title of the page, and information within the page’s code matches the
query.
II. Off-the-page Factors
(External Links)
a. Search engines score your Web
site by its popularity. Popularity is determined by the number of sites that
link to yours, and by the popularity of those sites.
i. Having 1 link from a
‘popular’ page is better than 100 links from ‘unpopular’ pages
ii. Popularity is determined by
the number of non-SPAM links pointing to a page.
The sections below describe what
specific design steps should be implemented in the Web design process to ensure
that search engines rank your site as highly as possible.
Title
Ensure that each page of your
Web site has a unique HTML title (inside the <TITLE> tag) – that clearly
states the purpose of the page.
The title of each Web page
should be unique, written in plain English (or the language of the page), and
should be keyword centric, meaning that it should reflect the most probable
words that will be used to search.
I. The title is the most
important of the SEO standards since it is the number one way that a search
engine determines the topic of your page. The search engine will use that
topic, or classification, to determine the search results for which your page
will be considered.
II. Summarize the content of
your page in less than 10 words and then enter your business’ name (separated
by a hyphen ‘-‘ or a vertical line ‘|’).
Page Text
The text on each page of your
Web site should be full of keywords, including synonyms, plurals, etc., which
are relevant to the topic of the page.
This step is the simplest to
explain, yet the most difficult to implement. You need to try to achieve the
optimal balance between keyword-dense text and text that is engaging to the
reader.
I. Keep the human reader in
mind! Make sure your SEO efforts don’t override your sales and marketing
messaging.
II. Effective keywords are words
and phrases users would commonly type when searching for the content offered on
the page.
External Links
Search engines strive for search
results that are relevant for the user. To that end, they use the popularity of
a page as a proxy to relevance. This popularity is determined by the number and
quality of inbound links.
Generally, the links on a Web
site that point to external pages are placed there to direct the audience to
other compelling content or to better explain an on-page topic .
Therefore, it is easy to see how
informational pages (blogs, encyclopedia-style pages, articles, etc.) would get
more external links than commerce/transactional pages.
Recognizing that it is more
difficult for commerce-focused pages to be linked to in this manner, it is
necessary, for SEO purposes for you to actively seek out such links.
Not all links are created equal,
however. Just as a search engine determines the relevancy or popularity of your
Web page by the number of links that point to you; a search engine will also
use the respective popularity of the linking page to weigh the popularity of
your page. One link from a “popular” Web site (such as cnet.com or cbc.ca) is
worth more than many links from Web sites that themselves have few inbound
links. Links from “trusted” pages such as government pages or educational institution
Web sites are generally considered to be the most valuable.
Inbound links from sites that
search engines consider spam-related have NO impact, or may even have a
negative impact, on your SEO rankings. Search engines generally do a good job
of determining whether a site is a spam site. Buying links from a disreputable affiliate
network or link-farm will not help the search engine rank of your Web site, and
it might lead to your site being banned from a search engine’s listings.
Page Layout
Where possible, the text on your
page (in the body, on menus, captions, side-boxes, etc.) should be coded into
the page. Search engines cannot read text that is imbedded in an image file.
If you need to have text on your
page imbedded in an image (for your logo, for example, or if you need to use a
non-standard font for branding purposes) use the <ALT> tag for that image
to write out the text. Also, all photos or graphics on your site should have a descriptive <ALT> tag.
Search engines cannot read the
content that is not coded into the page. However, many sites enhance the user
experience by using JavaScript, Flash, Ajax or Frames. Text in such format
should also appear in the plain HTML markup. Keep the following in mind.
I. Search Engines cannot read
JavaScript markup.
II. Frames should not be used
for important text content for which users may be searching. The text within
the frame will NOT be associated with the parent page.
III. The use of AJAX can prevent
a page’s content from being indexed.
IV. The use of Flash can greatly
enhance the user experience, but it cannot be indexed by search engines.
If any of the above features are
important to the look and feel of your Web site, you should consider providing
a plain text link to a script-free version of the content on those pages.
META Tags
META Description Tag
Each page in your Web site
should have a META Description tag. This tag should consist of a brief
keyword-rich description of the topic and purpose of the Web page.
Often, this is the blurb that
search engines use to present in the natural result for a page. Search engines
will typically show the first 20 words of the description. Guidelines for an
effective META description are as follows:
I. Keep the description to fewer
than 200 characters.
II. Describe only content that
is visible on the page.
III. Use plain, natural
language.
META Keywords Tag
The META Keywords tag is
sometimes used by search engines for classification purposes. Keyword tags
containing keywords that do not appear in the body of the Web page are
sometimes flagged by search engines as being spam.
I. Note that the keyword tag is
used for classification purposes and not for page ranking.
URL Guidelines
The URL of each page of your Web
site should be a concise summary of the page title. Other URL guidelines are as
follows:
I. Use dashes ‘-‘ to represent
spaces between words
II. Do not repeat keywords more
than once in the URL
III. Do not use more than 5
words between slashes ‘/’
IV. The keywords in the URL
should appear within the plain English text on the page.
a. For example: The Web page of
an apparel store that sells Gucci Suits should identify the most important
keyword “store” “Gucci” and “Suits” in the URL.
www.YourFashion.com/store/gucci-suits
V. Where possible the URL should
be free of dynamic query parameters such as www.example.com?pageid=23¶m1=c4331
a. This can be accomplished via
a mod_rewrite or URL rewrite engine. For example, a URL like www.example.com/23/ c4331 is more search
engine friendly.
b. Search engine crawlers have a
difficult time indexing parameters. If parameters are necessary, there should
not be more than 2 sets of parameters.
c. Dynamic URLs should follow
the descriptive URL guidelines where possible.
Permanent Links and Sitemap
A user should be able to
navigate to every page in your Web site – from any page in your Web site.
Therefore, each of your Web pages should have at least one permanent text link
that points to it. (A permanent link is one that exists on a page that is a
permanent part of the site, such as a sitemap, rather than a temporary page
like a promotional page.) Secure pages that require a user to log in or temporary
pages, such as promotional pages, are excluded from this standard and do not
needs a permanent link those points to them.
Search engines favor text links.
They use the text that is part of the link to determine the topic of the linked
page. Other link guidelines are as follows:
I. All of the content on your
Web site should be accessible in no more than 4 clicks from any other page.
Search engines consider content buried deep in your site to be less important,
and may not index it.
a. Your home page should be
reachable from every page in your Web site. This tells the search engine that
it is the most important page in your site.
b. Consider using a Sitemap and
other navigational links to help meet this goal.
II. Links on your Web site
should exist inside HTML page elements in the code of a page (and not in a
Frame or in Flash, JavaScript, Ajax or other programming language) Search
engines commonanonly follow links in HTML code. The example below show an HTML
link code and part of a JavaScript link code which a search engine cannot read:
a. For example:
i. HTML Link: <a
href=“www.example.com/sample-page.htm”> is preferred to:
ii. JavaScript link: … var
linkHTML = ‘’;var thisURL = window.location + ‘’;…”
b. Include descriptive text in
the <ALT> tag for each link that is not text-based, such as an
image-based link. Keep in mind, however, that non-text-based links should be
avoided
c. Links inside Flash,
JavaScript, or AJAX are totally invisible to search engines and do not have any
SEO-related impact.
III. A page with no links to it
is considered an orphaned page. Except for specific reasons such as pages
placed outside of normal navigation as Pay-per-click landing pages or pages
created for testing purposes, no page on your Web site should be an orphan.
IV. SITEMAP – Your business Web site should have a sitemap of crawl-able
text links to enable search engines to easily reach all content areas.
a. However, no page on your
site, even a sitemap, should have more than 50 links per page – break up the
sitemap into multiple pages if this is a concern.
Use Google’s Free Tools
Google offers Webmasters 2 free tools
that are particularly important for SEO purposes:
I. Sitemap Submission Tool (www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps)
a. Giving Google a sitemap of your Web site increases the likelihood that
Google will index all of the content on your site.
b. Please note that this is not a
magic tool! This will not help with the ranking of your pages. Using the
sitemap submission tool only increases the likelihood that Google actually
reads all of your content. The rank that it will assign your Web site is based
following the SEO practices in this document.
II. Google Local Business Center
(www.google.com/local/add)
a. Search Engine users are
increasingly turning to local search features such as Google Maps to find
businesses in their area (or an area which they plan to visit). Google has a
local search directory to which you can add your business – so that
region-specific searches may find your business.
DO NOT Engage in Spam
Search engines are typically more
capable at identifying spam than most professional Web designers are at hiding
it. You should be aware that the following practices will not help your site’s
ranking in search engine results:
I. Buying or selling links (except
through reputable affiliate agencies).
II. Hiding text from human users (by
using white fonts color, CSS attributes, or other methods).
III. Hiding external links with small
images.
IV. Publishing pages that are not
intended for human users, or content on pages that is not intended for people
to see.
Conclusion
As you create or update a Web
site, only you can determine the balance between optimizing for search engines
and making a compelling Web site for your customers.
On an ongoing basis, you should
be seeking inbound links and reviewing your Web site to ensure that it is
optimized.
You should understand that there
is no guarantee that your page will appear first in the search results for your
desired search terms.
Also, ranking improvements
typically take weeks or months to become fully evident. This is due to the lag
between the time you make changes to your Web site and the time your Web site
is re-indexed by the search engines, as well as the tendency of search engines
to favor the status quo of their listings for the sake of consistency.
However, consistently following
the guidelines in this document for your Web site will ensure a positive impact
in the ranking of your Web pages and ultimately, will result in improved
visibility for your business.
Reference:
http://econsultancy.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment