After we complete market analysis, the usual next step is to optimize every major page on your website for maximum search engine visibility. Search engine optimization is best regarded as a long term strategy - improvements may not show up for months when the market is competitive. However, for many market niches no one is using search engine optimization and increased search engine traffic shows after one or two weeks. It all depends on the market!
The “Title” Element
This is the single most important page element to get right. It shows at the top of the browser window when your page is displayed, and it’s the major display element for each entry on the search engine results page. But most important of all, it’s used by all the major search engines as the primary indicator of page content.
Think of the title element as your web page’s major heading. It deserves attention.
Metadata
Web page metadata is located in the <head> section of each page, and a surprising number of web developers don’t bother entering it. The important metadata is the “description” and “keyword” metadata.
- Description metadata is the 150-odd characters of text you see under the page title in search engine results pages. Our research has shown that Google sometimes uses it for page relevancy, and sometimes doesn’t (they don’t tell us exactly how it gets used). However what we do know is that it’s crucial for human readers - well-crafted description text is as important as a major sub-heading in marketing material.
- Keyword metadata is used by the Yahoo! and Ask search engines in relevancy calculations, but it’s not a major factor. Google and Microsoft appear to ignore it completely.
Page Content
The content on each page needs to be organized in a way that emphasizes its meaning to the search engines. All the following page elements have some bearing on how search engines interpret your pages:
- Alt tags are displayed as text when a reader places their mouse over an image.
- Headline tags add predefined styles to headings and subheadings in page content, as well as signaling to the search engines that they carry more meaning than normal body text.
- Keyword density - those important keywords should be present multiple times in normal page text without affecting readability or meaning, and they should reinforce the main message each page conveys.
- Lists - like headlines, ordered and unordered lists indicate important concepts on the page and signal higher relevance to the search engines.
Internal Linking
It makes sense that search engines can find every page on your website by following links from the home page. We check links to ensure links are functional and complete, and the anchor text on each link conveys the correct meaning to the page it points to. Internal linking is an important aspect of search engine optimization that is often underestimated by web designers.
Sitemaps
When we’re done implementing these changes, we generate a special file called a sitemap and submit it to the major search engines. This file gives search engines the pointers it needs to find every page on your website, and flags that changes have been made for immediate indexing.
Site Submission
We use a proprietary site submission tool to additionally advise search engines of new or changed content. Unlike other tools, ours uses a number of social networking sites and directories to elevate the indexing request. We have found the use of this tool increases the number of pagesvisited, and index updates occur sooner.
