| Here’s the good news: search engine optimization (SEO) best practices do exist. The bad news is that these ‘best practices’ are more a constantly shifting, evolving set of parameters than a fixed bulleted list, that have to keep up with search engine algorithms. |
| So, let’s start by looking at factors that contribute to the success of an SEO program: |
- Content
- Site Structure
- Link Building
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| If you haven’t got one of the above as a component in your SEO program, it’s back to the drawing board, big time. |
| 1. Content |
| It’s already a cliché, but ‘content is still king’. How do you determine the content that needs to go into the site? The product managers, service heads and marketing managers will chip in with valuable ideas for site content; and the content team will flesh out the ideas into full bodied articles, but one can still be off the mark. You need to consciously ask if people are searching for that content. Sure, they must be, as these ideas have come from domain experts – you just need to be sure that the keywords included in the article will give you most bang for the effort. |
| Keywords |
| Here is where your SEO team can help. Based on your article ideas and your competitors, the SEO team can help fine-tune the content or identify the starter set of ‘keywords’ (which are actually phrases made up of two or more words) to be included in the articles. |
| Note that each piece of content is best optimized for one keyword (as described earlier a keyword can consist of two or more words; for example - ‘credit card’). So if you have identified 100 or so keywords, you ideally would be writing 100 pieces of content. Of course if some keywords are similar, for example, ‘credit card’ and ‘credit cards’ you might choose just one of them to write content about. |
| Keywords should preferably have a density of about 2-6% within the article - that is, the keyword you are optimizing for on a page should appear at least twice in the content, for every 100 words. It is also useful to put some of the optimized keywords in bold. |
| Now that you have your million dollar content in place, prepare it such that the world - which in today’s reality means the search engines - can see it! |
| Title Meta Tags |
| The keyword that was used to create the content, or for which the page has been optimized, goes into the Title Meta Tag. Other similar keywords can also be part of this list - for example, if you are optimizing for the keyword ‘credit card’ you can keep ‘credit cards’, ‘platinum card’, ‘gold credit card’ too as part of the meta tag. While adding in more keywords keep in mind that there are only 80 characters that the search engine displays in the results. So your core keywords should be part of the first eighty characters. It is a good practice to put the brand name at the end of the Title tag. |
| Header Tags |
| Header Tags not just give any page (or story on the page) a heading, but also help the search engine crawler identify this content as important to the page. There can be different levels of header tags – from H1 to all the way to H6, but you need not overdo them; three to four levels should be fine. Ensure that the keyword or keywords being optimized on the page get into the header tags. |
| URL Canonicalization |
| With Google penalization for duplicate content looming large in the background, the last you need is Google penalizing your legitimate content, because you have several URLs for a page. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best URL when there are several choices. |
| Consider these URL’s listed below: |
- www.example.com
- example.com/
- www.example.com/index.html
- example.com/home.asp
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| URL Structure |
| Include the keyword being optimized on the page in the URL. For example, if you are optimizing the keyword ‘credit card’ for a website www.example.com, the URL could read www.example.com/credit-card/ |
| Make your URLs descriptive and human-friendly.. www.example.com/seo/article/maximize-roi-with -seo.htm is better than www.example.com/article-seo-max-roi.htm. |
| Using dynamic URLs with cryptic query parameters can reduce the SEO value of your content. A query parameter such as: ?asset=article&topic=seo is better than ?dir=2&no=4, but it is best to avoid query parameters completely. Avoid special characters in URLs as well. |
| If your CMS creates URLs automatically – check your CMS documentation for URL rewriting options. Core keywords should be closest to the root directory. For example the word “credit card” is better optimized in the URL www.example.com/credit-card than in www.example.com/DFOM/biz/credit-card. |
| Meta Keywords |
| Meta Keyword Tags, though written off by Google, are still a major part of your page tags especially if you are performing an SEO exercise for search engines such as Bing or Yahoo. Keep the keywords relevant to the page content but do not go overboard with keywords – not more than 300 characters. Do not put more than three variations of a keyword in the keyword tag – it will be considered keyword stuffing. |
| Alt Text for Images |
| Use descriptive alternate text for the images on your web pages. When you are scrambling for space to insert your keywords in the content of your site, do not ignore the 100 characters that you use in the Alt text for your images. For example, for a page optimized for the word ‘credit card’, if there are credit card images, it would be right to give the images appropriate alt text such as ‘credit card’, ‘platinum credit card’, ‘gold credit card’, etc. |
| Flash |
| Though search engines currently have some capability to index flash videos, from a best practices perspective Flash could have an adverse effect on the page. Flash is good when you need to show animated diagrams, demos and to increase user interaction. But from an SEO perspective you need to have a fair amount of text along with Flash content – Flash should be used to illustrate the content, not be the main content on the site. |
| 2. Site Structure |
| If you want your site to be visible to (in other words, indexable by) search engines, you need to keep a few factors in mind to meet certain search engine requirements, else the most visually stunning site can turn into a disaster. |
- Clear navigation using text links.
- Sitemaps to ensure the site is easily accessible by humans and bots. Have an HTML and XML sitemap in place to help search engines easily navigate between different sections, and help point them to the important pages on your.
- Effective internal linking to ensure the bots index all pages you want them to.
- Effective folder structure (see also URL Structure section above)
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| 3. Link Building |
| Search engines value ‘good’ sites linking back to your site – the more the number of sites linking back to you, better your site in the eyes of the search engine. A simple yardstick is sites with a higher page rank than yours, linking back to you. Go for quality back links than quantity – getting a large volume of links from spammy sites is likely to get your site down than pull it up. |
| Some places on the web to consider while link building: |
- Submission to Article and Press Release directories. Submit unique content to different directories, as duplicate content is not very likely to be indexed by search engines.
- .edu and .gov sites are excellent places to get reputed back links to your site.
- Submission to Google favorite directories DMOZ and Yahoo. Do note that getting indexed with DMOZ can take time – even up to six months!
- If you are a reputable organization or if you have content that is encyclopedic in nature get on to Wikipedia. This will help get a quality link from Wikipedia and also good referral traffic from Wikipedia.
- Participate and spread the word through Yahoo Buzz and Yahoo Answers – another Google favorite.
- Get a link from your blogs (set up your first blog if you don’t have one yet!); get some influential bloggers to link to you.
- Provide users with online options to easily bookmark your site – Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon, and more - a slow and sure way to create a buzz about the product and also to get back links.
- Be active in forums, review sites, blogs, and consumer sites, and link back to your site. Be sure to check that the site allows a link back to the site; else your effort might not amount to much.
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| Keep track of your back links using the Google Webmaster tool. It keeps a repository of sites linking to your sites. In case of any spammy site linking to your site you can report the same to Google and avoid penalization. |
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| Further reading |
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