Today’s I’m going to show you how to ensure your on-page optimization doesn’t turn engines away.
Let me first tell you a story. A friend of mine keeps his toothbrush in
his kitchen. Thinking it peculiar, I inquired about it. He responded,
“Do you keep your plates in your bathroom?” I thought this more
quizzical than the placement of his brush. There is a lot less bacteria
in my kitchen cabinet than out in the open in my bathroom.
It turns out he’s right;
ironically, placing a toothbrush, an instrument of cleaning, out in the
open in the bathroom increases its likelihood of being tarnished with
bacteria. What other ironies are occurring in our offline lives!
Here and now, what about online? Fabulous web designers, strong
copywriters, and clever marketers devote energy into your brand’s
website and presence, making impressions on current and potential
customers.
However, are search engines turned away from your site? Are your site’s pages properly optimized for best indexation and reception?
Terrible irony alert – your brand’s ability to communicate with
customers is fantastic, yet its presence and optimization of online
platforms is poor.
Site Architecture
URLs
Maintain consistency with your URL structure. Keep URLs short, exacting a logic regarding main and subfolders. Best methods include:
- Targeting key terms
- Using hyphens between words
- Being consistent
Take the time to map to-be URLs, making them succinct and logical.
Crawl Access
Don’t sacrifice design and function for accessibility; optimize your
brand’s online property (You would not lock the front door to your brick
and mortal store, right?) Particular Flash and Java design elements, though eye pleasing, could block engine spiders and possibility of indexation.
For better crawling:
- Limit using Flash and Java
- Use webmaster tools to check indexation
Canonicals
Webmasters and marketers devote energy toward link building and
driving traffic to particular pages, these pages eventually building
authority. But what if brand pages were competing against other brand
pages?
Sometimes, due to page navigation, session IDs, and other
architecture issues, pages have more than one URL associated to them.
Alert search engines of your preferred URL, using the canonical attribution.
Titles and Description
How would you file your business papers? For best organization and
results of recovery, you’re likely to put everything in its unique
place.
Meta titles and descriptions
help search engines do the same with your brand’s pages. For best
results, make each title and description unique, creating a great
experience for users while facilitating indexation.
Robots.txt
How do sailors navigate the vast seas? They have maps and the stars
to guide them. Help search engines navigate your site; lend extra
direction with robot.txt files.
The added ability to direct search engine spiders and communicate
crawl preferences, modifications, and eliminations is a huge benefit for
many webmasters who compose and submit succinct and clean robot.txt
files.
Load Times
This an insight inextricably associated with user experience as well,
consumers don’t like to wait (especially with plenty of choices at
hand). Mind your site’s and individual pages’ load times.
Webmasters
apply a number of structure modifications (such as minimizing html,
using content delivery networks, and particularly positioning style
sheets) in order to increase page speeds and load times. Additionally,
webmasters read hosting reviews, ensuring chosen hosts’ architectures are optimized for quick load speeds.
Content
Language
Your brand message and approach may differ depending on location and
language, for instance when selling to a consumer in America as compared
to one in Sweden. Search engines embrace unique content; therefore,
make your content unique and targeted toward chosen languages.
Purchase domains targeted toward a particular countries; optimize
pages for countries and not languages; and, target specific search
engines when considering content placement.
Quantity
Prior Google updates
targeted content ‘farms’ or lazy methods of advertising, penalizing
those who create multiple pages with little to no difference in message
or principle.
Consolidate brand messages as well as the site-unique pages hosting
them. Rather than ten pages related to respective topics, search engines
prefer one, robust page efficiently fulfilling consumer queries.
External/Interlinking
Webmasters interlink site pages, facilitating user experience; additionally, external links improve the research experience of consumers.
While certain actions (such as evading a ‘link farm’ or heavy
external link page) are not endorsed, no exact rules regarding the
number of internal and outgoing links exist. Therefore, webmasters
balance the number of links on respective pages for optimal indexation
and engagement.
Keywords
In the early days of the web, when engines used on-page elements
(like the number of times a word is used in text) to serve queries,
webmasters ‘stuffed’ words in text, hoping to trump other web pages of
similar topic.
Those days are gone, and while best methods of communication point to
the obvious use of particular words associated with products and
services, executing natural methods of communication work best with
consumers and search engines. Keyword density tools exist, helping webmasters determine consistency of message and volume of waged words.
Video
Brands seeking to make solid impacts with customers (after the terror
of Panda and Penguin) embrace forms of content marketing, distributing
content via textual blogs, visual infographics, and multimedia videos.
In-house strategists and content services use consumer knowledge to
engineer messages, driving optimal reception, traffic, and conversions.
The introduction to snippets and schema markup in the SERPs has
influenced user behavior. One marketer finds the conversion rate of a
particular key term increasing over 300% due to video content and proper markup.
Schema Markup and Snippets
You’re driving down the road, looking out the window, seeing nothing
but blue skies. A huge billboard comes into view; you can’t help but
notice the ad, whether you’re immediately in need of the brand’s
services or products. Snippets offer brands further ability to make
engine-generated results standout from the crowd.
Engines read webmaster-inserted schema markups,
delivering the added information to onlookers in reference to movie
ratings, food recipes, publication authors, and more. As adding a video
increased a marketer’s conversion rate in the above video example,
snippets improve visibility, and in comparison to a competitor’s served
result, could dramatically improve conversion rates.
Did you know smiling can get you promoted?
Maybe my hygienic friend was hoping to get a raise. Raise the appraisal
of your site’s pages by minding the above sections and messages.
Remember, you want your brand to make a magical impression; however,
ensure on-page elements are not hiding your brand’s ability to show
search engines and consumers your smile. Turn them on and not away with
on-page optimization.
