Basics of SEO Friendly Website Development
Search engines have limitation in how they crawl the web and interpret
content. A webpage is always seen in a different way by search engines and by us.
Here we are about to discuss some important technical and architectural aspects of websites, which should be taken care while developing a new website.
Quality Content
Content always plays a major role for any website success. This is one of the most important area which should be carefully planned.
Secondly we should make the content easily index-able by search engines, by placing it in proper HTML code.
In order to be listed in the search engines, your most important content
should be in HTML text format. Images, Flash files, Java applets, and
other non-text content are often ignored or devalued by search engine
spiders, despite advances in crawling technology. The easiest way to
ensure that the words and phrases you display to your visitors are
visible to search engines is to place it in the HTML text on the page.
Link Structure
All the search engines crawlers look for a structure which is easy to understand and crawl. Just as search engines need to see content in order to list pages in
their massive keyword-based indices, they also need to see links in
order to find the content. A crawlable link structure - one that lets
their spiders browse the pathways of a website - is vital in order to
find all of the pages on a website. Hundreds of thousands of sites make
the critical mistake of structuring their navigation in ways that search
engines cannot access, thus impacting their ability to get pages listed
in the search engines' indices.
Some common issues why web pages are not reachable for search engine crawlers
- Submission required forms - Search engines crawlers can not access any page where any sort of access permission is required.
- URL's displayed through Java Script - Search engine crawlers either don't crawl java script based URL's or they provide very less importance to those links. All the links present on website should be in HTML.
- Links in Java, Flash or other plug-ins
- Links pointing to pages which are blocked by robots.txt or meta robots
- Links on pages with hundreds of links
- Links through frames or i-frames
If above hurdles are taken care at the time of developing a new website, we can easily assure that our URL's, web pages or content will be crawled.
Keywords Usage & Targeting
Keywords are fundamental to the search process - they are the building
blocks of language and of search. In fact, the entire science of
information retrieval (including web-based search engines like Google)
is based on keywords. As the engines crawl and index the contents of
pages around the web, they keep track of those pages in keyword-based
indices. Thus, rather than storing 25 billion web pages all in one
database, the engines have millions and millions of smaller databases,
each centered on a particular keyword term or phrase. This makes it much
faster for the engines to retrieve the data they need in a mere
fraction of a second.
So if you want to rank for any particular term, you will have to make sure that keyword is included in your content, title, description, alt tags, headings, title attribute and other on page factors.
On-Page Optimization
Keyword usage and targeting are still a part of the search engines'
ranking algorithms, and we can leverage some effective "best practices"
for keyword usage to help create pages that are close to "optimized."
Here at Moz, we engage in a lot of testing and get to see a huge number
of search results and shifts based on keyword usage tactics.
As per SEO MOZ there are some standard practices which should be followed for on-page SEO
- Use the keyword in the title tag at least once. Try to keep the keyword as close to the beginning of the title tag as possible. More detail on title tags follows later in this section.
- Once prominently near the top of the page.
- At least 2-3 times, including variations, in the body copy on the page - sometimes a few more if there's a lot of text content. You may find additional value in using the keyword or variations more than this, but in our experience, adding more instances of a term or phrase tends to have little to no impact on rankings.
- At least once in the alt attribute of an image on the page. This not only helps with web search, but also image search, which can occasionally bring valuable traffic.
- Once in the URL. Additional rules for URLs and keywords are discussed later on in this section.
- At least once in the meta description tag. Note that the meta description tag does NOT get used by the engines for rankings, but rather helps to attract clicks by searchers from the results page, as it is the "snippet" of text used by the search engines.
- Generally not in link anchor text on the page itself that points to other pages on your site or different domains (this is a bit complex - see this blog post for details).
Rich Snippets
Ever see a 5 star rating in a search result? Chances are, the search
engine received that information from rich snippets embedded on the
webpage. Rich snippets are a type of structured data that allow
webmasters to mark up content in ways that provide information to the
search engines.
While the use of rich snippets and structured data is not a required
element of search engine friendly design, its growing adoption means
that webmasters who take advantage may enjoy an advantage in some
circumstances.
Structured data means adding markup to your content so that search
engines can easily identify what type of content it is. Schema.org
provides several types of examples of data that can benefit from
structured markup. These include people, products, reviews, businesses,
recipes and events.
Often the search engines include structured data in search results,
such as in the case of user reviews (stars) and author profiles
(pictures.) There are several good resources for learning more about
rich snippets online, including information at Schema.org and Google's Rich Snippet Testing Tool.
Source of Information : http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development
