We covered the Google web masters tool yesterday and I recommend it to be setup on your website to start with. So, that you can measure and know from Google’s point of view about your own website. In next few blog posts I want to cover official training material that is available from various sources and a summary of the key points that they cover.
If you search on Google about the official material on doing SEO. you will most probably end up on the Google Search Engine Optimization starter guide. ( Link to the starter guide ) It is a 32 page guide which is made in a very easy to read way and covers a wide variety of topics. I am mentioning the list here and also as to follow ‘learning by doing’, will soon share the audit of our own website as per the starter guide.
So, let’s jump into the key points that matter:
On making the search engine better understand your website:
1. Is your site having unique and accurate page titles for all the pages that are there in your website? (our site has some 90 pages, will share the audit soon with you)
2. Are you using the description meta tag : it is basically a short summary of your page content. Make sure it is unique and accurate.
3. How does your URL structure look like? Is the link that you create is self explanatory of the content or is it cryptic. Like: by looking at a typical youtube URL you can tell about the video content in it!
compare this to my previous post link: http://www.mixorg.com/2014/03/how-to-do-search-engine-optimization-seoseries-1/ . Can you guess the content in my post from the URL itself?
4. Use of 404 error pages to to easily take the user back to engaging pages. Apparently Google has covered this topic quiet well. You can refer their help here on creating the 404 pages
5. Better anchor text, alternate image text, image site map and video site map: Search engines can best understand text but they have a poor understanding of rich media content. So, we need to help them by using extra HTML tags to explain for the search engine crawlers to understand. Anchor text is the text that explains the link which is present in the content. For example in the point 4 I am referring to the 404 pages and pointing to a Google page. Similarly ALT text for images is that text which explains images.
6. Does your site have site maps? For the search engines to know what all webpages your website has and it is not going to miss any page. It is better to have the site map and submit it using the web masters tool for indexing.
There are some other details in the starting guide about the nofollow tag to combat spamming from other third parties. Use of headings etc. I encourage you to download the guide and maybe share with us the audit of your website against these points. Hope this will help you improve the website ranking on search engines.
More to come soon!
Thanks and Regards
-sachin
