We covered the first 10 of these hints in a previous post. Are you ready for some more useful hints on Search Engine Optimization that you can put to work on your websites or blog right away?
- Text as images – I’ve been on this one for a long time. But I’ll say it again: If you can’t copy and paste it into a text editor, search engines can’t read it. If you must use text as an image, be sure to repeat the wording in the image’s “alt” tag.
- Short URLs – The longer the URL of a web page, the less important the page looks to search engine crawlers. URLs should also contain keywords relevant to the title. Name both your directories and your files with names that are meaningful to the content. And as I stated in a previous hint in this series, the longer the URL, the harder it is to remember and type in without error. Try to remember he needs of both the search engines and your visitors.
- Flash – Flash Video (FLV) is a wonderful tool for inserting video into websites, but websites entirely constructed in Flash cannot be indexed by search engines. And sites with a home page that makes a visitor choose between a Flash version and an HTML version (typically labeled “for those with slow connections”), just annoys your visitors.
- Splash pages – AKA “Doorway” pages are another of those cute little website features that drive visitors away. Your most important content should be on your home page. Don’t bury it behind a splash page unless a 50% loss of visitors is your goal. Splash pages are very often composed of a Flash movie and a link the skip the movie. And I don’t know anyone searching for the keyphrase “Click here to skip.”
- Social networking sites – Having a page on MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Xanga, Yahoo 360 and Yelp among others gives your website a presence in the social networking sites used by millions, as well as providing links back your website. You might consider maintaining an account on these services as well as Technorati, Del.icio.us and Digg. Get started with these – you will soon find more that you might be interested in. There is a large list of social networking sites on WikiPedia.
- Dynamic URLs – Watch the long strings of variable included in your URLs. You can use a few, such as the “?page=” string that you see in WordPress PermaLinks (although you can customize WordPress PermaLinks into a much more search engine friendly version). Plus, they are very hard for visitors to remember or type in without making an error. If your dynamic URLs are too long, consider software that will replace them with shorter, more descriptive links.
- Session IDs – E-commerce and other sites use session IDs to track users purchases and other information about them while they are on the site. Using unnecessary session IDs or timestamps make the search engine think every link has duplicate content.
- 301 Redirect – Redirect (301) old URLs to the new location of moved content so search engines will still count those old links. Avoid dead links, even if they are for old content.
- 301 your domains – Redirect (301) your http://domain.com traffic to http://www.domain.com traffic. Domains with the “www” and those without it are two different URLs. Be sure that your web server software is configured so you don’t lose those who use either version.
- Links to authorities – Links to authorities on your content let search engines know what your page is about. For example, if you have a website about cars, link to Kelley Blue Book, Motor Trend and others. Have a site about gardening? Link to the National Gardening Association or GardenWeb. In short, you might want to kink to the sites that rank first in a few of your key keywords.
- Javascript redirects – These will get you. Don’t use JavaScript redirects in any links. Use href links instead. That being said, don;t be afraid to use JavaScript in links – just don’t use them as the redirect.
- Buying links – Link farms, link free-for-alls, etc. Search Engines keep an eye on networks that sell links, and flag them, and the sites they link to, as spam sites. Not a good thing. Stay away from links from sites whose business is selling links.
Two top 10 lists with a total of 23 hints. I think you got your money’s worth. Have you implemented any of them yet? They won’t work for you until you do. And as with any changes to your website’s SEO, it will take some time for these changes to take effect and help your ranking. Let me know how you do.
Bob Stovall has been marketing on the Internet since 1991. Bob is the founder of BobStovall.com, a blog for Internet marketers, OrangeCat.net for Web Hosting Made Easy and is the Director of the Association of Real Estate Investment Professionals (AREIP.org).
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