SEO Friendly Structuring

Your website cannot be an island. If you plan to draw visitors to your domain through organic search traffic, you’ll first need to understand the core principles on how search engines index and read your site content. Optimizing your website for search engines will generally mean that search bots can easily crawl and interpret your content with ease and without doorways that may require human action. Ensure your content is:

  • Not contained within graphics that bots can’t read
  • Open and indexable in an HTML friendly format
  • Not locked behind password protected areas
  • On pages that do not require advanced user interaction to open
  • Not built using Flash

Ensuring that each and every one of your website’s pages obey these basic SEO principles will go a long way in driving your ranking results toward the top of the search engine ladder.

The Anatomy of a Well Optimized Page

Look beyond the keywords on a page and analyze your pages from a top down approach. Page titles, page headlines and URLs should contain relevant keywords. The content itself should be original and written naturally –avoid keyword stuffing. Your PageRank will be measured largely on the uniqueness and originality of your content. If you see to it that your pages answer search queries your chances of converting web traffic will improve immensely. Other aspects of good page structure will include the use of original images, graphs or charts and labeling your media with captions and alt image text. Anchor text (hyperlinks) from other internal pages will also assist bots with site crawls and allow them to better understand the relationship and hierarchy of your content.

Best SEO Techniques

Matt Cutts, a well-known webspam leader and spokesperson at Google, repeatedly emphasizes the importance of creating good content and user experiences as a fundamental part of good SEO. Of course, the inclusion of keywords within rich and original content will go a long way in getting your website a higher Google rank, but content that is intriguing and worthy of discussions and social sharing can be even more potent. Ask yourself if the content on your website pages are fascinating and compelling enough that one might like, post or tweet about it. It’s not just the word count or number of times you include a keyword that will have an impact as much as the quality of your content.

What Are Backlinks?

A backlink is a hyperlink stemming from one domain, pointing back to the other; in other words one website that is linked to another. Backlinks have traditionally been a means for how search engines measured your
website’s popularity. All things being equal, if we look at 2 websites offering the same content, theoretically, the domain with more backlinks attributed to it tells a search engine which content may carry more authority and trust. Once upon a time, search results were prioritized largely based on backlink measurement, until many SEO companies abused this tactic as a means to slant results in their favour. Today’s search engines are much more advanced than they used to be, and grade your PageRank on hundreds of elements -not just backlinks.