A client recently asked for a quick overview of good SEO practises, so I thought I’d share them with all of you at the same time. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but following these items will definitely make a difference to your site’s performance in major search engines. These are roughly in order of priority (the first items being the most important):
- Landing Pages: It’s impossible to do a good job of optimizing your homepage for every possible term people might use to find your site. Think of it as a town fair full of criers who are all yelling their own messages: the end result is a din of roughly equal volume in which nothing stands out. Plan instead to add a page to your site for each search term, heavily optimized for that term using all the tips below, so that page becomes the top organic search result for the term and therefore the page that visitors land on when coming to your site. It’s important to make sure that these pages aren’t islands (i.e.: not linked from any of the site’s main content), because otherwise web crawlers may not find and index them.
- Titles: Some of the most overlooked SEO real estate in the world is staring right at you from the top of this very window. The
<title>tag, which sets the text displayed in the title bar of the browser window, is very highly rate by search engines as being indicative of the page’s content. The engines differ in how much of the<title>they index, but the general rule of thumb is that the first 60 or so characters are the most important. This dictates that the search term should come before things like a company name, so it would be better to have “8 SEO Tips and Tricks » JayGoldman.com” rather than “JayGoldman.com: 8 SEO Tips and Tricks”. Luckily, this also tends to be more useful to users when they view their browser history or bookmarks in a narrow window or menu that cuts off the text, since the name of the page they want is more likely to be visible. I use the WordPress SEO Title Tag Plugin to swap the order around on this blog. - Repetition: The search term should be repeated in an
<h1>as close to the top of the<body>as possible. We saw a difference for some of Radiant Core’s clients between having text at the top of the HTML and moving it down for presentation using CSS and just putting it at the bottom (e.g.: the list of SEO links at the bottom of the TargetVacations site actually occurs at the top of the HTML and is moved down through a combination of CSS and JavaScript since the page’s length is variable). The term should be repeated again in a<p>following that<h1>, ideally surrounded by<strong>tags. - Font Replacement: A necessity if you’re particular to a specific font and want to make sure your text is rendered in it. Since HTML doesn’t yet support embedding fonts (though it’s coming in CSS3 asWebFonts), specifying a font in CSS will only work if the person viewing your site has that font installed on their computer (and could still look strange if they have a different font with the same name). There are two popular routes: image replacement and sIFR for Flash-based replacement. Image replacement is much more limiting in that it requires you to create an image for each piece of text, while sIFR can be really difficult to get working, requires Flash for display, and can really slow down page rendering. I use a mix of the two on the homepage of this blog, rendering the header using image replacement since it never changes and rendering blog titles in sIFR to get Futura without having to manually create images for each post’s title............................
Read more-Source- 8 SEO Tips and Tricks
0 comments:
Post a Comment