SEO Techniques

• Overview
• Document title
• Headings (H1, H2, H3)
• Body text
• URL
• Sitemap and robots.txt
• Meta description
• Links
• HTML Code and page load time
• Images
• Meta keywords

 

General suggestions

• Make websites for people, not search engines.
• Make websites that convert to your end goal… not just rank for keywords.
• Build a brand around a community. One that loves you and will fight for you because they love your services. Don’t shut them off.
• Make your brand so big that search engines need you.
• Don’t focus on just one keyword. Do a proper keyword research to find out what people seeking your products and services are actually using.
• Read Google’s SEO Starter Guide:

 

Document title

• Make sure that your title tag includes your keyword (a greater weighting is given to key phrases at the left of the title tag)
• A compelling call-to-action might help you get a better click-through rate in Google search engine results pages.
• Make title tag unique on each page (Google Webmaster Tools can help you detect problems with the title tags).
• Avoid keyword stuffing in your page title.
• Using the table above to compare your site to your competition.

 

Headings (H1, H2, H3)

• Avoid keyword stuffing in any of heading tags because it will do more harm than good
• Using your keyword in H1 or H2 can give some minor positive effects on SEO
• <h1> is the most important heading – use it only once or twice per document and include your keyword there if it fits naturally
• Use the tables above to compare your site to your competition

 

Body text

• Make sure that the keyword you are targeting with this page really is in your body text
• Avoid keyword stuffing in body text. Remember – each page should be targeted to different keywords.
• Put main keywords closer to the top of the document
• Don’t hide text through colors by blending text color with background color
• Avoid too high keyword density (>10%) as it may lead to penalty (use synonyms, related words and LSI words – this will help you find them)
• Using the table above to compare your site to your competition (pay attention to keyword density)

 

URL

• Make “user-friendly” urls; put your keywords there and leave out stop words like “I”, “a”, “an” etc. Also try to avoid special characters like “&”, “?”, “=”, “$”, “%”, “^” in the URL.
• Avoid keyword stuffing in URLs and try to keep them within a reasonable length
• Google suggests that you should use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.
• Use the table above to compare your URL to your competition

 

Domain name

• If possible, put your main keyword in the domain name
• For SEO it seems that there is no difference between delimiting words in domain name or writing them together. From marketing standpoint it’s better not to delimit words in domain name with dashes because of word of mouth marketing.

 

Sitemap and robots.txt

• It is important to submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools
• It is important to include a link to sitemap file in your robots.txt file
• If you want to put sitemap on different domain you must put a link to it in your robots.txt file
• All information about sitemaps – http://www.sitemaps.org/
• You can also submit your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools
• If you don’t have a sitemap, try sitemap generators

 

Robots.txt

• Robots.txt should contain a link to your sitemap (for example: Sitemap: http://www.jyfabrics.com/sitemap.xml)
• All information about robots.txt – http://www.robotstxt.org/

 

Meta robots tag

• Use Meta robots tag if you want to prevent search engines from indexing the page.
• More information about meta robots tag – http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html
• Your Meta robots tag is empty – that’s perfectly fine.

 

Meta description

• Make sure that the keyword you are targeting really is in your meta description
• Create unique meta description for every page
• Put your keyword closer to the start of the meta description
• A compelling call-to-action in Meta description might help you get a better click-through rate in Google search engine results pages.
• Avoid keyword stuffing in meta description
• Keep the length of Meta description under 160 characters (15 – 20 words) to make sure that your message isn’t truncated in Google SERPs.
• Make Meta description different from page title (<title>).
• Using the table above (meta description analysis) to compare your site to your competition

 

Links

• Follow Google’s suggestions on URL structure:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=76329&hl=en

• For internal linking – put no follow attribute on links to unimportant pages (from SEO standpoint – like “Privacy Policy”, “Contact us” and other pages)
• Put keywords in anchor texts
• If link anchor is an image then put anchor text in image’s “alt” attribute
• Avoid keyword stuffing in anchor texts
• Avoid using un-related phrases like “click here” or “more…” in anchor texts
• Linking to similar external sites will help search engines to determine your site’s theme
• Use the list above to check your anchor texts and no follow attributes

 

HTML Code and page load time

• 100% valid code is great but most of the time search engine spiders can process invalid code as well.
• Using less TABLE tag tags may result in faster page load
• Having smaller HTML will result in faster page load
• Avoid broken images on your site as it slows down page load (click on the “Load time” link to get list of broken images on site)
• Put CSS in external files. If you can combine all CSS information into one file it will make your page load faster
• Put JavaScript code in external files. If you can combine all JavaScript code information into one file it will make your page load faster
• If you are using common JS libraries (like jquery, prototype, moo tools and others) use Google Ajax Libraries API (more info here)

 

Images

• Use “alt” texts to describe the image – for accessibility and SEO reasons
• Don’t overuse “alt” texts, for example, don’t add them to spacer images or layout of images
• Put keywords in “alt” texts if they make sense in the context
• You can also use keywords in filenames (write keywords together or separate them with dashes)
• Avoid keyword stuffing in “alt” texts or filenames
• Use the list above to check your “alt” texts

 

Meta keywords

• Use the table above (competitor’s meta keywords list) to find new keywords to target