The Basic Guide to Internal Search Engine Optimization
If you are hoping to increase your website’s ranking in the major search engines, including Google, Yahoo, and Bing, a few basic internal optimization elements must be addressed to make your hope a reality. In this guide, we will cover the foundational elements necessary to achieve search engine ranking success. Please keep in mind that this guide assumes you have already done your keyword research and decided which pages you want to optimize for each keyword.
Properly Optimized Title Tags:
Most SEO’s, including myself, will tell you that your title tag is the most important on-page ranking factor. The search engines use your title tag to gain an understanding of what each particular page is about. Each page on your site should have a unique, keyword rich title. When developing your title tags, it is important to think about which keyword(s) is most important to that page and include it at the beginning of the title. Also, limit the number of characters for each title to 90. Although Google will only display up to 70 characters in the search results, we feel that, if necessary, adding the additional keywords can help more than hurt your rankings.
Not only is the formatting of your title important, but so is its placement within your html code. As a best practice, we recommend that the <title> be the first line of code in the <head> section of your html. Here is an example of a properly optimized title tag within the html code:
<head>
<title>Search Engine Optimization Services | Marketing, Advertising | Customer Magnetism</title>
To quickly see what the title tags of your site look like do a simple site:www.domain.com search. Is each title unique? If not, then you are missing a big opportunity for search engine rankings.
Properly Optimized Meta Description and Meta Keywords Tags:
Of these two essential internal elements, the meta description is much more important and should be carefully crafted to provide a keyword rich message as well as a compelling call to action. The meta description, along with the title tag, is often displayed in the search results and should therefore provide a reason for a user to click on your result instead of one of your competitors. When crafting your meta description, incorporate the same keywords that you used in your title, but write it in such a way that it sounds conversational. Try to limit your meta description to about 200 characters. Although there is no "set limit," the search engines tend to display the first 150 characters or so. So make sure your message and most important keywords for that page are placed towards the beginning.
As with the title tag, the placement of the meta description is also important. We recommend that you place the meta description directly below the title tag. Here is an example of a properly optimized meta description within the html code:
<head>
<title>Search Engine Optimization Services | Marketing, Advertising | Customer Magnetism</title>
<meta name="description" content="Proven search engine optimization services to improve your website ranking. Customer Magnetism offers search engine marketing services for organic and paid advertising in Google, Yahoo, MSN and other major search engines." />
Sometimes ignored by SEO’s, the meta keywords tag should be utilized as it is still used by search engines such as Yahoo as a ranking factor. However, care must be taken not to "spam" this tag, which could end up causing you more problems than if you decided not to use the keywords tag at all. Although there are no character limits to follow here, I would recommend only including the most relevant keywords for each particular page. And do not repeat the same word more than three times. For example, if you are selling shoes, your tag should read: "shoes, running, hiking, dress, shoe" instead of "shoes, running shoes, hiking shoes, dress shoes, running shoe, hiking shoe, dress shoe."
Building on the above example, incorporate your meta keywords tag beneath the description tag, as follows:
<head>
<title>Search Engine Optimization Services | Marketing, Advertising | Customer Magnetism</title>
<meta name="description" content="Proven search engine optimization services to improve your website ranking. Customer Magnetism offers search engine marketing services for organic and paid advertising in Google, Yahoo, MSN and other major search engines." />
<meta name="keywords" content="search engine optimization, marketing, advertising, positioning, placement, ranking, website, internet, services, firm, company" />
To view the current code on your website simply right click on any part of your page in an Internet browser and select "View Page Source." Then take inventory of how your title and meta data stack up. Is your title simply the name of your company? Does every page on your site have the exact same title? If you answer yes to either of these questions, perhaps you would further benefit from our professional optimization services.
Header Tags — H1, H2, H3…
The use of optimized header tags allows you to place emphasis on the important content areas of each page. It also helps to structure your sites content and validate your title and meta tags. An H1 tag should be utilized for your most important heading, followed by H2,3,4 etc. for subsequent headings. As a best practice, utilize the keywords from your title tag in the H1 tag. Also, limit the number of words used in the H tag to about 6 to 8 words.
ALT Attributes
Search engines cannot read images and as such alt text should be used on each image within your site to "tell" the search engine what that particular image is. However, in order to properly optimize your alt tags, your keywords should be considered and included in the tag. For example, if your store’s name is Bob’s and you sell shoes, the alt text of the "Bob’s" logo should be "Bob’s shoe store." It is also important to consider the size of the image and create alt text that is relative to the images size. And finally, take care not to spam your alt tag with sentences worth of content that is not relevant to the image. Keep in mind that alternative text attributes where originally created so that the visually impaired could browse the Internet with the use of screen readers.
Below is an example of a properly optimized image alt tag:
<img src="http://www.customermagnetism.com/images/natural-listings.jpg" alt="Organic Optimization Services" />
Content, Content, Content
Now that you are on the right path to SEO success, its now time to sit down and write. Armed with a list of your most important pages and keywords begin the writing process. Keyword rich text based content is crucial to any successful SEO campaign. As a general rule of thumb, include at least 250 words of text based content on each page. The difficult part of writing with SEO in mind is that some people try to incorporate the keywords too frequently, while others completely ignore the importance of keyword occurrence within the content. Although some SEO’s will recommend that you follow strict keyword density formulas, I can tell you that as long as you develop unique, compelling content that utilizes your targeted keywords NATURALLY, you are primed for success. Also keep in mind that each page should have a unique theme, focused around 1 to 3 keywords.
After you have put hours of time into crafting the most compelling content possible, its now time to consider your internal linking structure. Utilize keyword rich anchor text to link to other pages on your site. For example, if your homepage has lots of great content about all of the different shoes you sell, you want to use targeted keywords to link to the individual category pages. Rather than saying "Click Here," to learn more about blue shoes" use "view our selection of blue shoes…" This will tell the search engines that by following that link it’s likely the resulting page will be about "blue shoes" rather than about "Click Here."
Finally, now that you’ve written great content for your top level pages, it doesn’t mean you are finished. Continue to add new pages and content as often as possible. This will help your site to rank for more "long tail keywords." One simple way to add new content is by installing a blog such as wordpress on your site.
Sitemaps — XML and HTML
To ensure that the search engines completely crawl and index your site, create an html and xml sitemap. A link to the html sitemap should be included on each page of your site, generally in the footer area. Depending on the size of your site, you may want to create multiple sitemaps. For example, if you sell hundreds of running shoes, you should create one sitemap for your product categories (running, hiking, basketball) and a separate sitemap which lists the products from each category.
An xml sitemap enables search engines to better find pages that are available for crawling, which helps the search engines more efficiently crawl your site. There are many free sitemap generator tools available and for sites less than 500 pages, http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ is a great option.
Once you have created and saved the sitemap, simply upload it to the root directory, for example http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml. Next, you’ll want to notify the search engines of your sitemap by adding it to your robots.txt file (discussed below) and by submitting it via Google webmaster tools and Yahoo site explorer. A properly uploaded xml sitemap should look something like this:
Robots.txt
It’s likely there are certain areas of your site that you may wish to have blocked from the search engines. Perhaps it’s a personal directory or an individual file or printer-friendly pages (which can produce duplicate content). Be sure to include these files in your robots.txt file. Simply use a notepad program to create this file and upload it to the root directory of your site. A basic robots.txt file, which allows search engines complete access to your site looks as follows:
Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
User-agent: *
Disallow:
In the above example, User-agent: * includes all spiders and Disallow: means that nothing is disallowed from being crawled. To block a specific directory and page, the following would be needed:
Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
User-agent: *
Disallow: /private-directory
Disallow: /blockme.html
Just take care not to block your entire site through misuse of the robots.txt file. Google Webmaster Tools is a great resource to check the functionality of your robots.txt file.
Permanent (301) Redirects
For the purposes of this guide we will assume your site is running on an apache server and you can implement 301 redirects through the use of an .htaccess file. A 301 redirect is similar to an address change you would file with the post office if you were to move. This simply tells the search engines (and your users) that a particular page or an entire domain has moved from one location to another. 301 redirects are crucially important because they allow any page rank or link value that the old page/site had to be passed through to the new page/site.
www vs. non-www redirect: All websites exist at both the www and non www versions and unfortunately the search engines need to be told which is your preferred domain. This is accomplished by adding the following code at the beginning of your .htaccess file.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
By placing a 301 redirect from non-www to www you are telling the search engines that this is your preferred domain and any link value that has accumulated to the non preferred domain will be passed through to the preferred domain.
Page level redirects: If you have created a new page to replace an old one, you need to redirect the old page to the new page via the following code.
Redirect 301 /old-page.html http://www.domain.com/new-page.html
Say No to Spam
Now that you have a solid foundation of "what to do," lets take a brief look at a few things "not to do."
— White on white text – or making your text the same or similar color to your sites background.
— Hidden text – using div’s or any other method to "hide" text content from the search engines.
— Keyword stuffing – using lists of keywords either on page or in the meta data of your site.
— Link farms – having hundreds of links on each page. And even worse, pointing those links to completely irrelevant sites.
It’s our hope that this guide can get you started in the right direction for SEO success. We are confident that the time, energy, and money you put into your SEO campaign will produce a positive ROI for your business. Should you have any questions along the way or wish to leave the work to the experts, please contact us for a free consultation.
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