Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

When you have taken care of all your on-page optimization efforts, you must concentrate your website accessibility limitations. The whole idea of search engine optimization is to make your website more search engine friendly. At times we may overlook some of the very obvious factors, which will stop the search engines from accessing our website freely. Often when this happens, human visitors too may not be able to access our website. For a complete crawling of your website, proper indexing and for good traffic, your website should be made freely accessible.

One of the factors that irritate both search engine bots and human visitors is broken links. There is no use linking to a page that is not alive. All the links should have an active page linked to it and it should be the correct page. All your SEO efforts may turnout to be futile if you fail to make this basic check on your website for broken links. You will end up losing your ranking unnecessarily in the search engines for a mistake, which could have been easily corrected with timely checking. It is not enough to validate each link before the launch. You must revalidate all the links to see how they are performing when they are actually online.

Web pages that are too heavy can also cause accessibility problems. It is advised that your web pages should be 150kb or less. This does not include the image files that you will call from a different location. Search engines are afraid of web pages that take a long time to load. Because this is a clear indication of a large sized page. Search engines try to avoid pages that are too large to ensure that its index size is within manageable limits. They need to keep a close tab on this because when there are too many heavy files, it can slow down the search engine in fetching the right information.

It is not a bad idea to overflow to a second page when you have too much of data on a single page. A simple “More…” link will save you from most of the problems regarding the page size.

Another area that affects the accessibility of your website is invalid HTML codes and CSS files. It is important that your websites HTML and CSS coding comply with W3C. If you want a sure way of chasing away the search engine bots, then keep your HTML codes shabby.

If you have a number of forms in your website, make sure to test them when the site is live online. Make sure that on submission each form lands in the page you want them to land. Checking your forms in advance will save you from a lot of trouble. If the forms are not properly coded, they may result in wrong landing pages or page not found error.

We hear of web design companies promoting themselves saying that they create search engine friendly websites. We also hear from SEO companies and SEO professionals that you should have a search engine friendly websites. What do they actually mean by search engine friendly website?

There are few basic factors that need to be consideration that will make your website into a search engine friendly website. One of the important factors, which we have already discussed in this series, is the URL structure. This is one of the areas that is crucial for making your website into a search engine friendly website.

Secondly, the entire coding of your website should follow the expected standards. Incomplete tags and poor coding standards can make your website unfriendly to search engines. Therefore it is not just what hits the users’ eyes that make your website search engine friendly, but it is also the codes that are at the backend matter to the search engines.

Your website should be XHML compliant. It has to be validated for errors and all the errors should be rectified at the earliest possible. When you are designing a website XHTML errors are bound to be there but you have to make it a point to validate the codes and correct the error.

Your websites should avoid Java script as much as possible as search engines do not prefer Java script. Your website should also avoid using Frames as search engine spiders have problems with crawling websites with frames.

For best results include as much text as possible including the home page; minimize the use of images. When you need to use images, use them sparingly. Remember to use appropriate names for the images and always add Alt text.

Keep the web pages light so that they can load fast. Search engines love fast loading websites. Keep all the links active; broken links and 404 errors can affect your website’s friendliness. It will also irritate the online users who often are met with page cannot be found error messages.

When you use website design templates, try to bring variation in the pages as much as possible. Include a unique title for each page. Let the site navigation be clean it helps both users as well as search engines.

Try to avoid drop down menus as much as possible. Search engine spiders find it difficult to drill down the dropdown menus used for your website’s navigation. Use regular static menus for website navigation. Use breadcrumb links in all the pages.

Use both XML sitemap for search engines and a regular HTML sitemap for the users. It helps a great deal in getting your website indexed properly.

Use reliable hosting provider so that your website has the highest uptime possible.

Try to include add fresh content to your pages as much as possible. Fresh content to search engines is like carrot to the horses.

There is an ongoing debate between the web designers and SEO professionals on the use of Flash in websites. For web designers, Flash helps them in extending their creativity but for an SEO professional, this limits the online performance of the website and the search engine performance.

Google suggests that Flash be used sparingly only when it is needed because googlebot can index only the links and text. The context and the structure cannot be read by the googlebot, this makes the page useless when it comes to search engine performance. Google also suggests to use Flash content only for certain aspects of the website such as for rich media and to rely on the HTML content for the site’s navigation and content. Google shows YouTube as a classical example of this model. This allows the web designers to show their creativity while it keeps the SEO professionals from complaining.

While googlebot is at least able to index the content partially and extract the links, other search engine bots will not even be able to understand Flash content. Therefore, it is best to rely on HTML for best ranking. Some webmasters start using black hat tricks to balance the effects of Flash content and use cloaking, hidden text and doorway pages. It goes without saying that you should avoid all these black hat tricks. It is best to limit Flash to headers and use the search engine friendly HTML for rest of the pages.

Flash websites also take a long time to load which irritates the users with low speed internet connection. Some webmasters try using both versions for their website one on Flash and another on HTML. Before prescribing to such an approach, you must question yourself asking whether you really need a flash website and what value ad it has for your website. Highly professional looking websites can be created using HTML; therefore at onetime what was appreciated to be highly interactive and captivating is no more treated the same. More and more webmasters are becoming highly SEO conscious. The first question that people ask is, “Will the website you design perform well in the search engines?”

When you use Flash, you will miss out on all the keywords that are found in the content. Moreover, when you make your website search engine friendly by avoiding unnecessary Flash content, you will be able to make your website all the more easily accessible for visitors. Some people will be using some non-standard browsers that does not support you latest Flash formats, it can affect viewers experience when they have low speed internet connection. Not all internet users may be viewing your website through their PCs, some of them will be using their PDAs and other such smaller devices. Using Flash content extensively can reduce the accessibility factor dramatically. You should avoid everything that affects your website traffic.

The first thing you should let the recipient know is what they get out of responding to your request. Focus on benefits, not the features of your site - what do they care about your features? Tell the recipient how your website can solve his problems, and aim for their ego- if you tell them that you only plan to link eight or ten sites and they have been selected, that makes the request seem customized and more appealing!

2. Grab the reader’s interest

If you want people to read your link exchange message it will have to stand out. “Dear webmaster” is not going to cut it. Use the recipient’s real name - and write a personal message. Starting with “Dear webmaster” makes it all the more likely that it will be moved to the trash. Use a real email address with a real name as the sender address - the more professional, the better. Free email addresses from funky mail clients and email addresses with numbers look spammy.

3. Create the need and wish

The recipient of your link exchange message won’t react to your request if they have no need or wish to. You have to create this, preferably by doing something in advance. You can kick a webmaster up a notch from interest to feeling invested by downloading his ebook, subscribing to his newsletter or RSS feed, or asking permission to reprint a quote. They will feel more need to reciprocate if you have already done something. Be accessible, and show trust; include your phone number in your email.

Don’t make the recipient have to think. Supply copy/paste HTML code with your link information to make the linking process as easy as possible, but make it clear this is only for their convenience and of course they should use what linking methods they are most comfortable with.

Once you have established a rapport with the first webmaster you approach, you should find it easier to build the next relationship and the one after that. Yes, it takes longer than automated spamming asking for links, but the rewards and response are much higher when you take the time to do it right!

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