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SEO Tips Many ForgetJuly 20, 2011 – 1:16 pm |
 Riyaad |
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Search Engine Optimization should never be a task checked off as complete, rather a task that gets done over a period of time and lead into maintenance phases before being re-addressed at a later time. Your time frame for this process is indicative of the nature of your business and the digital competition you face. The Setup phase requires countless hours of research and development. Keywords, character counts and title tags, meta descriptions, etc are all among the things that are almost immediately addressed and will play a role in the ultimate success of your SEO efforts.
How do you phase out of implementation stages and bring yourself into periodic maintenance? Before preparing for an ongoing link building campaign, there are plenty of little things you can do that most people forget – and can tip the scales of Google in your favor. Here are some things to help improve your rankings that you should be doing:
Images
Alt Tags traditionally convey the information of the image when not available. They are not normally available to viewers unless their images are turned off and/or the
image cannot be loaded. For SEO, Alt Tags can enforce your sites relativity to keywords you have chosen to optimize for. Make sure your alt tags contain keywords that you have decided would drive the right kind of traffic to your website. Using this method appropriately can help your rankings. Make sure every image has an alt tag attached.
Copy
Editing a websites copy sometimes falls last on the list of priorities for an SEO auditor when in fact it should be one of the first things addressed. Changing a site’s copy is probably the number one thing you can do to change SEO rankings. The appearance of keywords in the copy of your webpage is looked at highly in most major search engines. It is important that your website not come off as spam. Keyword density is often argued, but around 2-8% is considered by many to be a standard – allowing you to insert keywords and keeping the text readable to your viewers. There are of course exceptions to this rule. Also keep in mind, keywords in the copy that are bold, or links may be looked upon more highly by search engines.
Code to Text Ratio
The code to text ratio is used to calculate the relevancy of a web page. Higher code to text ratio gives you better chances of getting positive organic search rankings. If your web page contains too much HTML code, it could prevent a search engine from crawling pages. Simple things can be done to fix this problem, ranging from simply adding more copy to your site, or by minimizing the amount of code used. This can be done by putting CSS and Javascript into external files, removing excess tags, and using CSS based layouts.
This problem has become more apparent in recent years with blogging systems like WordPress and Joomla, content management systems which allow people with little to no HTML knowledge, to update and manipulate web sites. While the constant addition of pages and keyword rich content on your site is a positive aspect, CMS’ use a lot of coding. This will affect your code to text ratio negatively.
Site Speed
Believe it or not, your website speed plays a small role in how your site is currently ranked. Site speed can be tested at a variety of sources online. My personal favorite being Google Site Speed Tester, which not only gives you a breakdown of how your website is scored in their system, but tells you how you can improve it. When website speed is positively viewed, your site has better chances of ranking.
These are just some of the details that many forget when optimizing for SEO. There are plenty more. Sometimes it’s the little things that will help.
