The goal of many website owners is to attain a higher search ranking. What they often don’t realize is that, if done correctly, the optimization site search engines can compliment optimization for users.
This means more people will find the website, which can translate to increased sales and/or lead generation. The following tips will help web site owners optimize their websites to achieve the higher search engine rankings they need.
Perform Keyword Research
Before you begin to design your website, you should perform some keyword analysis research to identify which keyword phrases your site should target. Using publicly available tools such as Word tracker, you can identify the keywords and key phrases relevant to your business that are searched most frequently, then you can specifically target those phrases.
Keyword research is also crucial for your site’s usability. While writing your site’s content try to incorporate using the keywords and phrases your customers search for, and you’ll literally be speaking the same language as your customers.
For example, you might choose to target the phrase, “sell ring tones”, because that’s what your website does. Keyword research would undoubtedly show you that web users are actually searching for “buy ring tones.” By using the phrase, “buy ring tones” on your website’s pages, you’ll be using the same words as your customers and they’ll be able to find what they’re looking for more easily.
Use Appropriate Page Titles
Many search engines place more importance on the page title than on any of the page’s other attributes. If the title adequately describes the content of that page, search engines will be able to more accurately determine what that the focus of the page is about.
A relevant page title also helps site visitors figure out where they are while navigating your website. The page title is the first thing that loads up, in most cases quite a few seconds before the content does so a descriptive, keyword-rich page title can be a real boon to user orientation and site navigation.
Use Headings and Sub-Headings
The opening paragraph should describe the page content. Search engines love content, but many engines are especially fond of the first 25 words on each page. Create an opening paragraph that adequately lays out the content of the rest of the page, or the site, in the case of the homepage. Try to incorporate your important key words and key phrases in this crucial area. By doing this you can give, both your users, and the search engines the information they are looking for.
When a user arrives at a web page the first thing the web user needs to know is whether or not this page has the information they are looking for. A good way to find out is to read through the first paragraph. If the opening paragraph sufficiently describes the page content, and the user finds a lead to the information they were looking for, they will almost certainly continue to search out the page or the website for the wanted information, product(s), or service(s).
Descriptive Link Text
Most search engines place a lot of significance on the link text. Search engines presume that link text will be descriptive of its target and, as such, examine the link text for all links that point to any page. If all the links that point to a page about car alarms read ‘click here for more info’, the search engines can’t gain any information about that page without visiting it. Conversely, if all the links read ‘about car alarms’, search engines can easily deduce what that page is about.
Descriptive links are also incredibly important for usability. If web users scan, rather than read, a massive amount of ‘click here’ links on the page will be worthless to them. Descriptive links act like signposts and land marks to scanning users. As the user looks down the page, they understand immediately where the link ‘about car alarms’ leads.
Avoid Using Frames
Usage of frames is quite an old technique, and although the practice is not as commonplace as it once was, they’re still out there. Using frames is commonly seen to be disadvantageous to your search engine ranking, because most search engines can’t follow links between frames.
Even if a search engine does index your pages, and Web users find you through a search engine, they will usually be taken to one of the pages within the frame. This page will probably be a content page with no navigation (navigation is normally contained in a separate frame) and, therefore, no way for the user to navigate to any other page on the site.
Frames are also disadvantageous for usability, as they can cause problems with the browser’s back button, printing, history and bookmarking. To put simply, try to steer clear of frames in your design.
Provide Quality Content
This may seem like a strange quality of a search-optimized website, but it’s actually very crucial. Search engines, in addition to page content, look at the number of links pointing into web pages. Often, the more inbound links a website has, and all other things being equal, the higher in the search rankings it will appear.
By providing new, creative, unique and regularly updated content on your website, other webmasters will want to link to your site. This practice provides extra value to their site visitors, and of course, you’ll also be adding value for your site visitors.
Optimizing your Website for both search engines and users shouldn’t have to be a trade-off. There is a significant amount of overlap between the tasks required to reach these two objectives, and this overlap can be used to your benefit.