7 steps to optimizing content

Many site owners or first time webmasters often overlook the most common mistakes when it comes to the SEO optimization of their website. By using these 7 simple steps your site will have the most common page elements designed to meet the ranking standards for the major search engines.

1.  Avoid the use of Flash and DHTML navigation menus and buttons. These require additional code that often makes it impossible for the search engine spiders to find all of your pages, thereby reducing your sites ranking potential! Use natural text menus with hyperlinks, this will insure that all of your pages are crawled and will allow you to use keywords in your “alt” text.

2.  Do not use “frames” pages. The search engine spiders will not be able to index all of the pages that are part of the frame and your sites crawl will not be complete. The use of “includes” pages will guarantee that all of your pages will be crawled and indexed.

3.  Avoid the use of internal scripting, such as javascript and other languages. This practice requires more time for the search engine spiders to crawl and index your pages. Whenever possible use external scripts that are placed in your cgi-bin or scripts folder in your web root.

4.  Always use a “robots.txt” file to help the search engine spider crawl and index your pages faster.  Every website has pages, and directories that do not need to be crawled and indexed, and by creating a robots.txt file you can speed up the crawling and indexing time of your site by adding a single robots Meta tag to each page. It is also important to add an inclusion tag with the full URL to your sites site map.

5.  Use keyword rich page names. This will enhance the relevant content value of each page on your site by telling the search engine spiders that this page relates to the keywords used in the Meta tag data for this page. Additionally only use keywords and phases that are related to each page’s actual content. This practice will add focus to your keywords and keyword rich content. Always use keywords in your header tags (H1, H2, etc) this highlight and add emphasis to your keywords when your site is crawled and indexed, but don’t over do it, it is important to keep your keyword density close to 2-3% otherwise your site could look like it is using stuffing techniques by the search engine spiders.

6.  Limit your Meta tags data to only use: Title, Description, Keywords, and Robots. Most of the other commonly used Meta tags are almost useless to the major search engine spiders and their inclusion will only serve to slow the indexing process and in some cases actually hurt your rankings. Keep your title tag under 70 characters and don’t use stop words.  Your sites description tag should not be longer than 100 characters.  Don’t keyword stuff and only use relevant keywords for each page. Always use relevant keywords in your page names, titles, and descriptions, and with your image alt tags.

7.  Create an xml site map for your site. The use of a site map will further enhance your site’s ranking potential by providing links to all of your sites pages in a friendly XML format. Google and yahoo, as well and many other search engines and directories consider a site map an important aid in crawling and indexing a site.