5 simple steps to improve your search rankings
A lot of people think that SEO is something that you pay a professional for, in some cases that is true, but this post will give you 5 simple things to do to your site to increase its position on SERP’s (Search Engine Results Page).
Rewrite URL’s
A lot of people still consider a re-written (or friendly) URL to be the key to good SERP positions. Google, last year, said that people don’t need to rewrite their URL’s anymore as their crawler has no problems with them, but so far I haven’t seen a statement to this effect from either Live or Yahoo! so it is certainly still a contributing factor, but it is far from being the only thing to keep in mind.
Rewriting URL’s not only makes it easier for bots to crawl the site, it makes it easier for user’s to recognise the page they are on the the link they are about to click. It is beneficial for many reasons.
The reasons behind rewriting URL’s for a bot, is that some bots (as mentioned above) apparently do not like dynamic URLs and will not follow links that contain ? and & (ie http://yoursite.com/?product=yourproduct&id=2), Google’s bot has no problems with these. The more important reason to rewrite URL’s for bots is that the crawler will add relevance to your page based on its URL. If you take the URL above as an example, there are no keywords in that URL that the bot could use to match search terms, but if you rewrote it as http://yoursite.com/shirts/waynes-world/ then the crawler has two or three terms to match to searches (ie ’shirts’, ‘waynes shirt’ or ‘waynes world shirts’).
For a great article on rewriting URL’s, see Michaels post: URL rewriting with Apache and PHP – a simple example
Content
As with URL’s, your content must be descriptive and unique to the page so that Google and other engines can associate keywords with your content. A title of ‘My Site’ is not quite as descriptive as ‘My Site – Specialists in Waynes World memorabilia and all round Fender fans’ and the latter will associate many more keywords to your domain and page. If this title changed on a per page basis from ‘My Site – Waynes World Hats’ to ‘My Site – Waynes World Figurines’ then Google would know when to serve one page before another when an explicit search term has been used (Hats / Figurines). This method of keywords goes further than titles and is extremely important in your pages meta data. Meta data is simply information about a file, it can be used in any files and in HTML it is used to tell the visitor when the page was updated, when to expect new content, what the page contains and more. Most Meta tags are ignored by web developers as they are seen as unnecessary, but in the world of SEO, there are two Meta tags that are very important; ‘description’ and ‘keywords’. In a nutshell, these two tell the bots what to associate with the page and how to describe the page to other users, thats why their uniqueness is very important. You dont want your visitors landing on your Figurines page when they clearly searched for Hats.
More on HTML Meta data can be seen at the W3schools site.
Lastly, I want to cover duplicate data. This might seem like a good idea to some people, put the same data on two pages and they’ll both get indexed and you’ll get double the traffic, right? Wrong. The Pagerank of your pages will both lack in strength due to the other page. Some searches (and incoming links) will point to one and some will point to the other. They will be only as important as each other and will not have a great combined interest. Basically, a good page will do very very well whereas two pages of the same content will do very very poorly, there is no middle ground for this.
More on content optimisation at Seomoz.
Link to and from good sources
Google Pagerank is a complex thing and goes above and beyond the scope of this article (and my knowledge), but heres the thing; Your sites Pagerank is split into the Pagerank of your domain name and the Pagerank of an individual page. By having links to your site from high Pagerank domains (google.com, wikipedia.com, etc) or from high importance domains (.gov, .edu, .gov.au, etc) you will increase your Pagerank, its that simple. But, if you link to sites that are shady (ie Gambling sites, phishing sites or sites that sell links) you will have an adverse affect on your Pagerank and if you link to the latter of that last group (sites that sell links) you can have your indexing removed from Google entirely. The trick is to add a ‘nofollow’ tag to untrusted external links – so, any link posted by a user on the site. This will cause Google to simply not follow that link as part of your ‘network’, so if they do follow the link, its not associated with your site. You are telling them that the link could be good or bad but either way, don’t trust it. This will stop the questionable external links from bringing down your Pagerank.
More on Pagerank at Wikipedia.
Sitemaps
I have heard as many good things said about sitemaps as bad things. I hear a lot of people say that they have had higher ranking pages after removing their sitemaps and others stating the opposite. From a personal point of view, I find that while my pages have not necesarily ranked higher at any time, I do now have many more pages in Google’s index than I did before I had them and I think this is the key. If the sitemaps are utilised correctly, they can be extremely good at adding many more pages to Google’s (and Yahoo!’s) index which is never a bad thing, but you need to make sure that you do not have any duplicate content as this could have negative effects. Make sure that pages are in sitemaps only once and that you utilise the priority tag also, as pointed out below, you dont want the Google bot crawling your contact page for changes and updated content.
Sculpt your internal links
About a year ago, I was having problems with Googles ’site links’ on the SERP’s for Skylines Australia. The site links were consistently forum members’ pages and were not pages of stronger content or forum topic pages (such as our ‘R35 GTR’ section which is one of the busiest on the site). I simply couldn’t work out why Google continuously treated these pages with a higher importance. After a discussion with a few other people (from SEOMoz mainly), I decided to try to sculpt my internal links to make the more important pages easier to find for the search engines. Firstly, in my sitemaps, I removed members’ profile pages altogether and gave other non important pages a lower priority in the sitemap. Lastly, I added a nofollow tag to all links to members’ profile pages to stop Google and other search engines from crawling those pages. The end result is many more relevant pages in SERP’s and stronger pages in the site links. You want to channel the bots through the site in the order you want it indexed. You don’t need your contact page to be indexed or at least without as much importance as your homepage, so you make it harder for the Google bot to find and index that page before it has indexed the other pages on your site because at the end of the day, the words you want associated with your site (keywords) are likely to be abundant on general pages, but not on the contact page and Google needs to see more of these to match relevant searches.
Don’t be daunted by this post, these things are very simple to do and will not take too long. If you have any questions at all about any of these topics, don’t hesitate to ask.
Further reading;
seobook.com – Sign up for their newsletter for tips and tricks.
seomoz.org - Read their free guides, particularly the beginners guide to SEO.
Getting started with the Search engines;
Yahoo’s Site Explorer
Googles Webmaster Tools
