SEO positioning Improve your website by 20%
- Keyword use in domain name. This is useful as it places your keyword into every link you have. So if you have a domain that reflects your trading name i.e. bloggandson.com (see article “Is your website working for you?”) then it will not be working for you. Whereas www.cirencester_builder.co.uk will help you because it defines what you and where you do it.
- Keyword use in page URL. This works in the same way as 25% point 3 above and relates your web page names. Using the scenario from above (and content from an earlier post) we start with a base URL of www.cirencester-builders.co.uk. Your home page will always be same i.e. index.html so the full address to your home page is (to a machine) www.cirencester-builders.co.uk/index.html. But let’s say that you are a building company and you build conservatories. It would be a great idea to call that page “conservatories.html” because you have then nested keywords i.e. www.cirencester-builders.co.uk/conservatories.html. Take out the address details and you have a keyword of “Cirencester builders conservatories”. Far more useful that www.bloggandson.com/page2.html.
- Links from social networks. Social networks is more important than this position in optimisation indicates. It is number 9 because you create it. But used successfully it can have a bigger impact. For example. Twitter gives you 140 characters, pretty much the same as an SMS message, so we use this as an alert. My twit may be “How to optimise your website in real life http://winninginch.co.uk/blog/index.html” This will hopefully get a few visitors to my blog page. If they like what is written they may link to it from their website. If they do my social networking link (ranked 9th) has now become a backlink ranked 2. So check your competition to see what they are using.
- Page load time. Ever come across a website that take ages to load? Did you wait for it or just go somewhere else. I know that I would not wait as life is too short. Search engines are programmed to think the same way. If you have a lot of images make sure their file size is small. Web images are between 72 and 96 dots per inch (dpi) which matched screen resolution. Anything larger is just wasting bandwidth as the image will not look any better but it take longer to load. Especially for those who are stuck with a 56k modem connection. Yes there are still those who do not have broadband!
- Keyword use in H2-H6 headline texts. This is pretty much the same as 25% point 2 above. Don’t over do it and in many cases unless you find it frequently in your top 10 (see how to in 6 above) do not use them at all.
- Keyword use in IMG ALT attributes. When you add an image or Flash to your website you add an “alternative” description. This is designed to help those who may be visually impaired using a text to speech web reader instead. The reader will describe the image using the “alt” text. Using a keyword here is useful but the best way to see if it makes sense is to close your eyes and have someone read the alternative text to you.
- Top level domain of web site. This relates to the latter part of the domain “.com”. Search engines take note of the extension and will often give preference of one over another (depending on where you are). Google UK will give preference to sites.co.uk for UK based searches and actually does it’s best by looking at your IP address. So for those who opt to limit searches to UK only will not need to do so quite so much in the future. Personally I stopped doing that about a year ago. If you have a .com and based in the UK get a .co.uk.
- Keyword used in bold text. See 5 above.
- Number of visitors. This one amuses me as it is a bit of ironic. If your website was in the top 10 you would have more visitors. Go figure. But specifically this relates to Alexa rank. Alexa measures your popularity by the number of visits you have. The best way to compare this is to go to Alexa and download their browser tool. This will give you a ranking for every website you visit as well as your top 10. The higher the number the lower your visits. So Google has an Alexa ranking of between 4 and 1 which is probably the highest in the world today. As a general rule for us mere mortals if you are in the top 100,000 you are doing exceptionally well. Anything above 1,000,000 is average for most. Following this guide will help you to increase traffic which will improve your Alexa ranking too.
Congratulations you have reached somewhere around 70-85% improvement for your website. From here on in these are nice to do’s. But important if you have not been able achieve one or more of the above.
