Welcome to the final installment of “Improve Your SEO.” This topic has been spread over three posts, so if you haven’t already, check out part 1 and part 2 of the series. This final post will concentrate on the final touches of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which you can implement to improve the performance of your site. The topics have been broken down with examples to give you a better understanding of how you can implement the changes.
This tutorial will cover splash pages, backlinking and javascript implementation, as well as URL structure and folder directory layout, all of which are extremely important in optimising your websites search engine friendliness and increasing traffic to your website.
Backlinking
One of the fundamental aspects to good SEO is your ability to obtain backlinks. When Google ranks your website, part of their algorithm is to look at how many other websites link to you, this known as backlinking and is key to the success of your website.
There are many companies offering this as a service, however be careful how you approach getting backlinks. The best rules are: only backlink to relevant websites; and make sure that the link is a worthwhile one.
You can generate links by contacting other websites directly and offering to trade, commenting on blogs, or helping out in forums and including your website in your signature.
Splash Pages
A splash page is in essence a gateway page found at the entrance to a website. User will hit this page and then be required to interact with a button or link in order to enter. Although, less common today than a few years ago, splash pages can still be found on websites both big and small.
This design plan probably stems from the designers parallel of written media such as book and magazine covers. But it is a fool who confuses the new media with old. The way we interact and search for information ont the Web is very different from that of print.
This mechanism simply acts as another step the user must take before they can get to where they are going. If you haven’t already guessed, the point I am making is “don’t splash.” It’s unnecessary and chances are you will lose traffic. You will create a far more user friendly experience by giving immediate access to a homepage with a good navigation and worth while content, not to mention Google will rank you higher.
Javascript In Your Pages
Modern web design has seen many advancements in javascript frameworks. However, it is worth considering that Google’s search algorithm includess several parameter when calculating results. One such parameter is Page load time — not just the physical page, also the time a javascript file takes to load up. Although the result may seem minimal, it is imperative if you want to maximise the success of your site that you take this into consideration.
You can improve the page load of your site by ensuring that you make your code as efficient as possible, for example: do not call in .js files on pages where they are not used or consider .gzipping javascript files.
The best rule of thumb is to create javascript files based on the pages they are used on. Don’t create one large file with everything dumped inside it. Break the files down into page specific ones, which will allow for minimal content to be loaded and in turn page load will be much improved. This will improve your search results.
URL Structure
Probably one of the most important aspects of search engine optimisation is the URL, as this is what a Googlebot will read when they search through websites. So it’s important that your URLs are as concise, readable and search friendly as possible. The key here is to remember that Googlebots are stupid, so don’t make them think. For example always end your URL with .html or .php so that bots know what language your web page is written in.
Directory structure is another important consideration, how you name your directories and sub directories can have a huge influence on how Google ranks your site. Make sure that they are descriptive and relate to the content on the page.
There are many who make the argument that shorter URL’s are much better than long ones. However there is no real evidence to support this. What is known is that anything after a ‘?’ will not be read by a Googlebot, so make sure that your URLs do not fall into this trap. For more help and advice on this check out .htaccess tutorials to show you how you can create search engine friendly URL’s
This series of tutorials should help arm you with the knowledge you need to improve traffic to your website, to get the right people looking in the right pages, but most importantly to improve the success of your web projects.
Really useful tutorial thanks very much!
The part on URL structure is dead wrong. Google is capable of spidering dynamically-generated content, so saying that anything after a ? in the url will be ignored is false.
Quote from Google Blog:
“If you have a dynamic URL which is in the standard format like foo?key1=value&key2=value2 we recommend that you leave the url unchanged…”
Source:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html
The only exception I would add to Chris’ comment above is to make sure you remove the session id from your url. Other than that he is correct, you can have arguments after a question mark. However I would not base your entire site on a structure like so: http://foo.com/index.php?page=2 and http://foo.com/index.php?page=3, and http://foo.com/index.php?page=4.
You have no hierarchy in that sort of structure.
You seem to have covered all the SEO basics, but I’ve been curious of how services like Google Trends and Google Insights can be leveraged to anticipate search terms and track how users change their queries over time. In the past I’ve only been using the stats belonging to the sites I’m working on, but these tools provide such a broader view of the big picture that it seems there is a wealth of insight to gain from them for SEO.
I’m curious if anyone else has thoughts or experience on these tools.
You are right on about the back-linking and splash pages. But I strongly disagree with the remaining points in this blog post. I would even go so far as to say that this is SEO FUD.
Google hasn’t been very explicit in describing how they work with javascript. There hasn’t been a Google Webmaster Central blog post about “This is all the details of how we deal with Javascript”. We only get little bits here and there. It seems that googlebot doesn’t read some types of Javascript, and that which they do, isn’t really parsed, only searched for links for further spidering. By having all your JS in one aggregated and compressed file you minimize the number of HTTP requests required and that single file is then cached by the browser/googlebot for the duration of the session. If you’re following the rules of semantic separation of content/style/behaviour and using JS for progressive enhancement, then this shouldn’t be a problem.
“For example always end your URL with .html or .php so that bots know what language your web page is written in.”
I don’t understand why that is important. Unless my site is about PHP or HTML chances are I don’t want to turn up in searches about those things and I don’t want to confuse Googlebot in thinking that my site is about those things. Whether you made your site in Java or PHP has no bearing on your SEO.
When it comes down to it SEO is 99% about three things:
* Write good quality copy. If you want to show up in searches about recycled paper products. Than have lots of clear well-written copy about recycled paper products.
* Well structured content. Semantic markup is key. Use header, list, paragraph etc. tags appropriately. Structure your page and URLs in a way that makes sense. It needs to make sense when JS, CSS and images are turned off.
* Backlinks. Backlinks from highly ranked sites are more valuable than low ranked sites. Generally more backlinks means higher rankings.
If you want to increase your SEO, better to work on improving that 99% instead of worrying about the hundred other things that make up that last 1%.
“The key here is to remember that Googlebots are stupid, so don’t make them think.”
Actually the contrary. Googlebot is very smart. Don’t try and out-think it.
Adam, what are you talking about,
“Actually the contrary. Googlebot is very smart. Don’t try and out-think it”
your talking utter nonsense the whole point is that you are telling the bot if its a picture, PDF or a html file etc, so it can process your page quicker. Just because this isn’t mentioned on word press documentation doesn’t mean its a lie! you should actually go out an research this stuff before you make bold nonfactual statements like that!
Nice Tutorial very informative!
“By having all your JS in one aggregated and compressed file you minimize the number of HTTP requests required”
correct me if im wrong but isn’t the web designed to make HTTP requests? you seem to be missing the point of the websites!!