Are you guilty of making these common SEO foul-ups? As a web developer, you want to launch that site as quickly as possible. But if your operation is a one-person job, it can be difficult to find time to brush up on SEO best practice. With clients’ expectations rising, designers and developers will always benefit from familiarising themselves with a few canny SEO tactics — like these ones … Not Using Web Fonts Web fonts are useful for making more of your content indexable. Whether you are using @font-face or Google’s web font collection, you can bring style to a page without sacrificing indexability.
Creating a Code-heavy Page Search engines (and users) would love your site that much more if the text loaded before anything else on a web page. Forgetting h1 Tags h2 and strong tags are not substitutes for an h1. Forgetting alt Tags on Images title and alt tags make site navigation better for any user. Overlooking a Sticky Footer A sticky footer is one that is present on every page. Calling Too Many Images at Once to Load a Page. 5 SEO Trends You Need to Consider for 2015. This post was sponsored by Link Assistant – SEO Power Suite. Thank you for supporting the sponsors who make SitePoint possible. I hope you’re not buying into the latest hype that “Search Engine Optimization is dead,” and “social is the new search.”
SEO is far from dead. In reality, SEO is evolving into an amalgamation of tried-and-true SEO techniques, content marketing, and social media optimization. 1. In September 2013, Google released its “Hummingbird” update. Semantics is a sub-discipline of linguistics that focuses on the study of meaning. Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query—the whole sentence or conversation or meaning—is taken into account, rather than particular words. Growth of Conversational Queries Over the past decade-and-a-half, Google has trained us to type in keywords that describe what we’re looking for. When I ask Siri the same question, she assumes I may be on the move and offers to call or give me directions. 2. The Non-Writer's Guide to Writing for Search Engines. In my companion article, The Non-Writer’s Guide to Writing for the Web, I gave you guidelines for creating effective website copy.
Humans aren’t the only audience you’re writing for. Search engines send out automated programs that crawl the web, searching for content to add to its database. What they find helps determine how well you rank in the search results. There was a day when writing for the search engines meant sacrificing your readers on the altar of better search results. That said, there are legitimate techniques that can improve your article or web page’s ranking. We’re going to discuss familiar search engine optimization (SEO) concepts like titles, headings and descriptions. Keyword Optimization Keywords are simply words and phrases someone would use to search for you on Google.
For example, if your site is about dentistry, then your “keywords” might be words and phrase like: DentistDentalDentistryDental officeTeeth whiteningSedation dentistryTooth whiteningCosmetic dentist. Web Standards for Writers. Remember the bad old days of all those “writing for the web” articles? Now, people writing for the web don’t just have other writers to rely on for advice—they have real, live standards to follow! Hooray! Here, I’ve pulled together some of those standards, and explained why they’re useful, and for what kinds of web writing.
If you have others to add, we’d love to hear about them too. Web content accessibility guidelines As we saw last week, increasing access to your content increases your content’s reach—its audience. These are pretty straightforward, even in their first reading. Obviously we should understand them in their entirety, but here I’ve listed the ones that, in my experience, are most pertinent to writers. Principle 1: Perceivability Principle 1 addresses the perceivability of content, so its guidelines focus on providing alternative forms of content, that suit the differing ways users perceive what we publish. 1.1 Text alternatives1.2 Time-based media alternatives1.3 Adaptable. Web Optimization: Where to Start – Official Bluehost Blog. Do you see web optimization as something shrouded in mystery? Contrary to popular belief, SEO is not an ancient, unknowable magic that only a select few have understanding of (though there are those who would have you think that).
Instead, search engine optimization simply involves taking certain steps to make sure your website is as visible as possible in search results. Most of these steps are quite practical, and you don’t have to follow every SEO trick in the book for it to work. Once you understand SEO, the work is mostly in staying consistent. How Does SEO Work? SEO is essentially a way to get “organic” listings in SERPS (search engine results pages). SEO is different from paid search ads. On-Page vs. In SEO circles you hear a lot about on-page and off-page SEO. On-Page SEO Factors Good content: Good content is content that fulfills a demand and is also easily shareable. Keyword density: This is simply a way to measure how often a certain word or phrase occurs in your text.
Internal Linking SEO Best Practices. Web pages rank because they are credible. Credibility comes from links. Inbound links from authoritative websites are the most valuable, but links from within a website are also important. They’re called internal links. Of course, the website navigation is one example, but we’re also talking about links in the content, on the pages. These links help visitors get around, but they are also a way to pass credibility from one page to another. Here’s a quick video on how links work in Google. Some of your pages have more “link popularity” than others, and so they have more credibility to pass on through internal links.
Yes, that may be the weirdest lingo in web marketing, but it’s important. Internal Linking Best Practices Here are nine best practices for internal linking. What should these links look like? 1. 2. 3. How many links should I add? 4. 5. Where should I put these links? 6. 7. 8. Tip: Use Google to search your own site for related pages: “site:www.yoursite.com [keyword].” 9. 1. 2. 3.
Making your site Search Engine Friendly. In order to add your pages to its database, a search engine (such as Google) will send out so-called crawlers, spiders or bots to harvest the text on your site. These bots cannot harvest things that are created by Javascript, or 'see' images (though they do check alt tags) and the don't play well with Flash files if at all. While all these things may make the site look better, they do little to nothing in terms of search engine optimisation (SEO) without adding descriptive information about those resources which are visible to a search engine (but not necessarily visible to your site visitors).
It is important that your website can be found by people who are looking for its content, therefore you must serve content to search engine 'bots' in a way that they can interpret, analyse and identify how relevant it is to the search query. Check Your Search Engine Ranking From Your Mac | SERank for Mac OS X & Windows. Monitor Your Rankings in Over 100 Search Engines The number one source of traffic and potential customers to your website this year will come from search engines. Over 90% of your customers are using search engines regularly to quickly find the products and information they are interested in. Tracking and maintaining where your website and the website of your competitors appear in search engines is vital to the success of your company. SERank lets you quickly see and compare where and when your website is appearing in over 100 search engines for the keywords your customers are searching.
With SERank you can quickly see where your website appears for 100's of keywords in just minutes and which of your competitors are stealing your customers because they are outranking you for your important keywords. Key Features Standard VS PRO Features Key Points SERank Features SERank Video Tutorials Check your Search Engine Rankings with SERank Watch Tutorial Watch Tutorial Non Techie Description. Step by Step Top Search Engine Rankings | SEIntelligence for Mac OS X.
Top Search Engine Rankings, Step by Step We know search engines like good content, we know they like other websites linking to ours, but what about the specifics? What kind of content should we have on our website, which websites do we need to link back to us and how do we find them? SEIntelligence has the answer to all of these questions and more.
By analyzing the currently ranking websites and comparing them to yours, SEIntelligence can tell you exactly what they are doing and what you need to change to match their strategy. Since we don't know specifically what search engines like, we can learn by what they currently rank at the top of their results. SEIntelligence gathers the top ranking websites for any keyword and goes through every aspect of their site structure, content and link building strategy. It then outlines exactly what you need to change on your website to match their strategy, and in turn, their high rankings. Key Features SEIntelligence comes with these great features; Domain Management Software | Domain SEO Tool | Domainer for Mac OS X & Windows.
Manage your domains with Domainer. Domainer lets you keep track of the domains you own, and the domains you want to own letting you know when they expire and which ones provide the best bang for your buck. With Domainer you can quickly analyze the value of domains by getting quick access to a website's Google PageRank, AlexaRank, Incoming Links, Delicious Social Tags and popular Digg stories.
All packaged together in the most beautiful Mac OS X interface you have ever seen in a domain management tool! Domainer now gets important blog popularity details and RSS subscriber information for both your blogs and your competitor's blogs. Using statistics from some of the most influential websites including technorati.com and feedburner.com, you can now compare how popular your blog is relative to your competitors.
With a beautifully designed, easy to use interface, Domainer can;