SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plays a vital role in making your blog popular. If your blog is designed optimal then there is a bright chance that your post might appear in thetop 10 in Google search engine. Design issues are a very important factor in achieving the very top rankings. The following article discusses about the design implications on search engine optimizationand pointing you in the right direction towards a search engine friendly design.
1) Identify relevant and specific keywords / phrases
List out all of the keywords you would like this page to be found for in the keyword Meta tag, beginning with your primary keyword. The Keyword tag should contain a list of keywords related to the services being offered on the page. Put the important words first, and limit the list for each page to 10-15 words/phrases including misspellings, acronyms and complete term where possible, for example, “SEO Tip”, “SEO Tips”, “search engine optimization”.
Don’t just focus on single words – multiple word phrases are often more effective and targeted. Consider noun + adjective. For example, “fast weight loss” rather than just “weight loss.”
Avoid over-use of marketing jargon; be direct and straightforward. Use general public and product-centric words.
Be specific – Searchers tend to be mission-oriented, so pick keywords that are laser focused on your product/service rather than broad category terms. For example, “oracle software” rather than “oracle”.
Empathize with the searcher – use words they would use not just how you describe the product/service. Choose a high-demand keyword phrase; include the words that people would actually search on.
Be able to answer these initial questions
- What do your visitors need?
- What words do they use to describe their requirements and problems?
- What Content do we have on our site that would satisfy someone’s search?
- What words would you search for to find that Content?
- How would you describe your blog to a novice?
- What words are your competitors targeting?
Competitors Analysis
Take a keyword, see who comes up in the top five and see who links to them. For example, take the keyword “iPhone Jailbreak” and see who is in the top 5 sites. Then, check backlinks coming to them and compile a list of folks you would want to link to your site. Use “link:URL” in the search bar to find all the pages that are linking to your page. You may use Google’s KeywordToolExternal for detailed analysis.
2) Optimize Search Page Title (Title Tag)
Also known as the browser title, it is what appear in the search engine result pages as the clickable heading describing what your site is all about.
Example: <title>iPhone 3.1.2 Firmware Jailbreak</title> where Search Page Title can have up to 75 characters. It should be easy to read for human eyes while having the primary keyword to help the spiders, since this is what users will see as the heading of a search result.
- Use <H1> and <H2> heading tags. The text content in these tags carry special weight with many search engines and are best used as closely after your body tag as possible.
- Each Search Page Title should be unique and relevant to the content of the page.
- Avoid repeating keywords within a title tag.
- Include call to action words in title tag such as benefits right within the Search Page Title.
- Primary keyword should be in the Search Page Title and near the beginning of the Search Page Title.
- Remove stop words (e.g., a or the) and hyphens from Search Page Title where possible.
- If you use acronyms in Search Page Title, they should be spelled out as well.
3) Optimize Description (Description Meta Tag)
Up to 150 characters; the primary keyword should be in the description. Keep it short, concise, and to-the-point, and create a unique description for each page. Use keyword near beginning of text, show benefit and call to action. Remove as many stop words (e.g., a or the) as possible to increase density of primary keyword in description tag. Use synonyms where possible.
4) Optimize Page Heading
Page heading and Search Page Title should have similar keywords – the primary keyword phrase should be used as the first word or near the beginning of the page heading. If the page heading is an image, you lose valuable real estate for your search term. Change to Text and include the primary keyword.
5) Optimize Body Content
The first sentence of the page should be a brief statement of a specific call to action or purpose of the page. This sentence is like the opening sentence of an article and sets the theme for the page. Also, engines like Google create the description for the results page by displaying the first sentence on the page that encapsulates the keyword that was searched.
Search engines generally focus on the first 300 words of a given page, so these words should contain targeted keywords in order to build a solid keyword density. Search engines prefer pages with an overall body word count of between 250 – 500 words. Having more words is not a problem as long as there is an adequate representation of the primary keyword phrase.
Writing techniques
- For content heavy pages, use inline links and anchors to different parts of the page and include the keyword.
- Outbound links do count – These refers to linking externally or internally, use descriptive link text rather than generic text such as “Click here,” “Learn more” – it helps users understand where they are going and it improves overall search engine ranking. Try to incorporate keywords, product names or other terms specific to the destination page. As a general rule of thumb, the link text should match the title of the destination page.
- Use direct and simple language to complement the searcher’s mindset to get information quickly.
- Include problem statements, not just solution names.
- Include at least 300 words per page.
Keyword usage on the body copy
- Use your keyword frequently and spread it throughout the page.
- Structure your content to include your keyword.
- Bolded text increases click-through rates.
- If your keyword is more than one word, keep the words adjacent.
- Use terms related to your keyword.
- Stem your keyword and use its plural when possible.
- Use synonyms and the complete forms of acronyms with any acronym based keywords.
- Marketing writers: Check with your business unit search leader to ensure that you are using the right words.
Keep Your Content Fresh
Google and other search engines love fresh and unique content. It helps to separate your site from countless others in your niche. From user point of view, we want to read the most updated information. This is what search engines trying to emphasize.
6) Optimize URL
Use of Keywords for Optimizing URL - This can help boost relevancy. Human readable URL structure can increase your click through rate. People click more on readable URLs as they give us idea about the actual content on the web page.
Separating multiple keywords in URL using hyphens – Using hyphens as dividers (and not underscores) will make it easier for search engines to understand your URL structure and exactly when it starts and when it ends for each keyword. We should keep only keywords in URL. And remove all numbers and words such as “the”, “of”, “in”, “your” and etc. If we keep those redundant words in the URl, it will dilute your keyword density in the URL and possibly make our URL exceed the length of 10 words.
Use One Version of URL To Access Your Web Page – Multiple version of URL for the same web page is considered as duplicate content in the eye of search engines. Search engines treat each URL uniquely. Each URL is an independent content even if the URL is just single character different from another URL.
Do not use uppercase or case sensitive words in URL – Keep complete url structure in lowercase. Limit The Number Of Words In Your URL. Search engines limit the crawling if the page URL contains too many keywords. Generally keywords not beyond 10 in your web page URL are the best. Search engines always prefer short and descriptive URLs.
7) Promote your page on within your domain – Create inbound internal links
An inbound internal link is a hyperlink that points to your page from another page in the same domain. Links to your page within your domain indicate that your page is an important element of the whole site. Unlike external links, you control how you use internal links. Effective internal linking not only affects ranking, but also page navigation, pageview, usability and customer satisfaction. The goal of internal links is to facilitate navigation and usability for spiders and visitors.
Techniques:
- Ensure that all links progress through the hierarchy of your site or content.
- Avoid link orphans or navigation dead ends.
- Create a link structure to ensure that you do not dilute URL strength. If possible, avoid redirects in your URLs that point to your target page. Use consistent URLs throughout the user experience. For large, Eclipse-based sites, webmasters can create a site map page with links to all the topics.
Creating internal linking opportunities:
- Leverage linking possibilities from the home-page content and other home page main categories.
- Place important links above the fold (where the user can see them) or in related links.
- Leverage internal blogs, wikis, and forums by ensuring that their owners link back to your page.
- Find opportune internal pages with the most back links.
8) Promote your page on outside your domain – Create inbound external links
An inbound external link is a link from a page outside the current domain into the Web site. The more external links you have linking to your site, the more important search engines think your site is. The goal is to get as many high-quality, contextually relevant links from pages outside of your domain as possible.
Building on existing relationships
- When looking for back-link partners, start with the folks you know and trust.
Finding new external link partners
- Find the top results for your keywords or related words and request links from “good fit” sites.
- Sites might contain resource directories where you can discover additional potential back-link partners. Search quality directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo.
- Research your competitor’s back links. Determine who is linking to them and what keywords they employ in their anchor text.
Capturing social media opportunities
Social media (Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon, etc), or Web 2.0, sites are the fastest growing source of external links on the Web. Build these tactics into your back-link plans:
- Participate in forums, Promote new resources, content or products to attract external links.
- Encourage user reviews and Provide a channel to your visitors for surfacing and addressing positives and negatives
- Interview clients or industry experts and encourage additional links from interviewee blogs and back links to you.
- Submit your corporate blog to blog directories such as blogsflux.com.
- Use RSS feeds and the track-back blog function.
