Intoweb Marketing takes care of all search engine optimization aspects to ensure that your site gains maximum visibility on search engines. If you take note of the following SEO tips, you can also make a difference and ensure that your site is search engine friendly.
Web design and SEO
Good optimization starts with the web page design. Although Flash and Cold Fusion are excellent web design tools for increasing visual attractiveness and interactivity of a site, the overuse of these tools can confuse spiders and make indexing of the site difficult. You should try to keep a balance between visual attractiveness, loading time, search engine friendliness, and content.
Avoid the use of frames as users often get trapped within your page. This frustrates them and can cost you return visits. Spiders cannot crawl websites set in frames, meaning that even though you have submitted your site, it will not be indexed.
Avoid the overuse of tables since tables make indexing difficult. Tables also influence the loading time of pages. There are many new design techniques that make the use of tables unnecessary.
Navigation
Make navigation through your site easy for both user and spider by including a sitemap and an easy to use menu. Avoid the dreaded introductory page altogether. It creates yet another page to be viewed before the user can get to the content and also proves to be a huge stumbling block for the spiders. Search engines require more than 250 words on a page for indexing and having an additional entry page before the index page thus reduces the chances of good ranking at search engines.
Images
Avoid the use of only images on your site. Both users and spiders dread sites that take ages to load and images have a way to slow down the loading of a site. Make images searchable through Alt tags and only use images when necessary.
Domain name selection
Although the domain name doesn’t contribute much to the building of traffic, the selection of an appropriate name to your business activities can be useful. Avoid long and difficult to remember names. If your main keyword can be incorporated into the URL or domain name, you will already have an advantage. If for instance, your site is about car sales, the domain name should reflect that rather than your company name. If the domain name contains the keyword, it will be ranked higher with the search engines.
Content
Although the balancing of open space and text is necessary to increase readability, you should have at least 250 to 300 words on a page for indexing purposes. Spiders love text and with enough text on a page, you reduce the risk of keyword spamming. Create useful, relevant and informative content to increase the chances of proper indexing.
Keywords
Search engines look for keywords since users type keywords and keyword phrases in the query boxes to conduct searches. Optimize each page for a specific keyword. You can alternate the use of a keyword on a page, but don’t try to optimize a page for more than three keywords at a time. The keyword should appear in the title, the first paragraph and the last paragraph. Don’t stuff the page with keywords. The density should be about 5 to 10 % for optimal effect.
Outbound links
Don’t place links to so-called free content for your users as you have worked hard to obtain incoming links and by placing outgoing links to unrelated sites, you lose the value of the inbound links. Google looks at the number of incoming links and the outgoing links. If there are more outbound links than incoming links, it will cause your page rank to drop. Rather keep outbound links limited.
Meta Tags
Although Google doesn’t make use of the Meta tags for indexing, other search engines do. Make sure your site has a Meta tag with a description, title tag and keywords relevant to the site. The description should be short and avoid the repetition of keywords as it can cause penalties against your site.
Black hat tricks
Avoid unethical SEO techniques such as the placement of keywords in the background where the user cannot see them. Search engines frown on this type of manipulation. Also avoid stuffing the page with keywords.
Duplicate content
You may have duplicate content on your site without being aware of it. If the content of a page is too similar to that of another web page, one of the pages gets penalized. Make use of Copyscape to track down sites that have duplicated your content.
Internal linking
Use descriptive links to connect pages within your website. This makes more sense for both the user and the search engine spider. Since spiders need working links to move from one page to another, make sure that all the links work and follow in a logical order.
Reciprocal links
Exchange links with related sites to increase your website’s ranking at search engines and to obtain more entry points. Create a link page for this purpose. Avoid link farms and make sure your site has interesting content to make linking a viable option for other sites.
Format of text
Use headings, bold and italics to provide more weight to selected keywords. Don’t overdo it though, as a keyword can become over optimized if it only appears in headings and bold.
Email signature
Always include a signature in your email communication. It should include your name, title, company name, web address, contact details and a catchy marketing phrase. People forward emails and in many cases, the recipients will click on the link to your site. Email signatures thus help to increase unique visits to a site.
Banner ads
Also create and place banner ads with links to your product or sales pages at other sites. It increases traffic, sales conversions and builds links to your site for better search engine ranking.
Submission
Once your site has the necessary Meta tags, excellent titles, incoming links, and relevant keywords placed in useful content, you should submit your site to the major search engines. Submission is time consuming and your site may not be included immediately since there are often backlogs on indexing, but stay patient and monitor the performance of the site.
The above SEO tips can be used as guidelines for improving traffic to your site. Contact us to help you get the best results through sound SEO techniques used by our online specialists.
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