In SEO for Alpaca Breeders Part I: Understanding SEO, we discussed how search engines work. So now you’re probably saying, “That’s all very interesting, but how do I increase my search engine results ranking?”
Google publishes guidelines that every webmaster should review. These don’t necessarily help you to optimize your ranking, but they provide a set of rules you should try and operate within. Remember, if Google feels that your website deliberately tries to manipulate ranking in ways that won’t satisfy the end user, they can banish you from their index server. Bad news indeed.
So let’s review the components of SEO again:
1. Keyword Density/Content of the webpage
Sophisticated search engines today focus on content more than any other component in determining the best match. That means text. Search engines cannot crawl a .jpg , image, or flash animation. You should look at the webpage you want to be found and derive what keywords you think best pertain to it. For instance, on a typical alpaca website homepage, you’d probably pick “alpaca” or “alpacas” (you don’t need both), “breeders”, “breeding”, “Your city e.g. Franktown”, “Your state e.g. Colorado”, “Livestock”, etc. All those words should appear in the text on your page, ideally in the first lines of text and frequently – in the most organic way possible. Your webpage should have at least 250 words of text. Remember, you need to have enough content to search on. What is the ideal density for your main keyword? 2% of total content has been suggested, but once again, search engine algorithms are unknown. At the same time, your content must read naturally, so don’t try to stuff in keywords if they don’t work. Your content should also be updated often, at least once every six months. Google indexes your site periodically, so it knows how often you change your content and what you changed as well. They use this to rate how current it is and also whether any manipulation is taking place.
2. Platform and structure of site
Search engines do best with mainstream platforms. The most commonly used one is Dreamweaver. Your website should also be organized in a way that shows a clear hierarchy so the search engine can easily index your website.
3. Quality of links
One of the ways to increase your ranking is to receive credibility from other websites. The more links that lead to your website, especially from high ranking webpages, the higher your own webpage will rank. Ideally, these links will contain one or some of your keywords. The links should be static as search engines ignore redirects. You should ask related sites to link to you. If you have a blog, link to your main website from it, though if your main website also links to your blog, this often causes negation of both links respective to SEO. Search engines are clever!
All the links on your own website should work. No broken or outdated links that lead to error messages.
4. Metatags
Although metatags have dropped in usage for search engines, they are the easiest change to make on each of your webpages. Review the content on each page and pick out the keywords that are appropriate for insertion in your keyword attributes. Each of those keywords should appear in your content. Spend some time crafting your content for your title tag, this is the header that will appear in Google search results besides being what appears in the browser toolbar. If you are returned in the search results, underneath the header will appear whatever you inserted in the meta description attribute. Here’s your chance to grab the user’s attention quickly by succinctly describing what is on that page. In the absence of a description, the search engine will default by showing the first lines of text on the webpage.
The language and robot metatags, the last two used for SEO, point out the language of the website and whether the website allows indexing. In almost all cases, your default (if you’re reading this) would be English and you should allow indexing. These two attributes are often left out, in which case the language will be determined and indexing will be assumed as permissable.
5. Site Registration
One of the ways to build links is to register your site in major and niche directories. An example of a major directory would be DMOZ.org, which is the website for the Open Directory Project, “the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web”.
Besides the above, you should also check out what SEO services come with your webhosting package. Mine, for instance, includes submission to search engines for indexing, DMOZ site registration, and additional services (for a fee). It takes a while to see results from any SEO efforts, so for now I’m giving it six months working it on my own to see if I can drive up my ranking with just these simple changes. My hosting package also includes website traffic stats, but if yours doesn’t, you can easily download Google Analytics for free to monitor trends.
Last, but not least, here are the top 4 mistakes people working on SEO make (source: LaSheita Sayer, Chief Marketing Officer/Founder of ZoZo Marketing Group, L.L.C.)
- Website is not maintained
- Link farms to generate junk links (SEO manipulation)
- Hidden text (e.g. black font on black background)/keyword stuffing
- Flash animation which can’t be read by search engine (YouTube videos with text descriptions are a better alternative)
- SEO Presentation at August 8, 2009 ABR Meeting by LaSheita Sayer, Chief Marketing Officer/Founder of ZoZo Marketing Group, L.L.C.
- How to Understand Search Engine Optimization on eHow.com
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