Getting Ranked 2 of 5
One of the main things search engines look at when ranking websites is Code. Think of your websites code like you would think of decor when selling your house. You might have a great house, but if the decor is missing or bad then your entire house will be underrepresented and difficult to sell. Search engines are your buyer when you are trying to get ranking and they take a close look at things like URL strings, navigation, accessibility, headings and meta tags. Here is what you can to do make your code work hard to get you ranking.
URL Strings
Your website needs to have clean URL strings. Some websites have extraneous characters in their URL such as http://www.website.com/site.php?art%=43%ju&14 which can prevent some search engine spiders from crawling them. You want the URLs clean with no extraneous characters in order get crawled and therefore indexed and ranked. One way you can accomplish this is through the .htaccess, however this article also provides some useful information.
Navigation
You want search engines to be able to find and index every page on your website. Links are important in your website because that will help the search engines find your pages. Sitemaps can also help because they enable search engine bots to find every page on your website through the collection of links. Smaller sites may not need a sitemap, but it certainly won't hurt and the extra effort can really pay off. For larger websites, a sitemap is a must. Google has a sitemap generator that might help.
Digg.com does a great job with navigation. They have a lot of navigational options (other than a sitemap) which give bots plenty to crawl. This allows them to get millions of pages indexed in Google and increases the chance that one or more of them will be ranked for certain search terms. By improving your navigation structure and getting more pages indexed, you will have more chances of pages getting ranked for certain keywords and drive more traffic to your website.
You also want to make sure that there are no broken links on your website. You want bots to crawl your website and not get stuck on a dead page that does not exist. They will not index a dead page and some people say that dead links can actually damage your ranking.
Accessibility
Bots don't like messy code, so try to avoid the use of tables, frames, or other elements that would get messy. Stick to valid CSS and XHTML in order to keep things clean. This will potentially help with your ranking and will also keep your website file size smaller. This will all help keep your content to code ratio larger which is something that search engines take into account when ranking.
Your website should be section 508 compliant. This involves things such as alt tags and titles within text links and pictures. An example of a title would be:
<a href="http://www.webdesign.com" title="web design">Web Design</a>
You can also make good use of titles by putting keywords into them. Be careful not to stuff the title with tons of keywords and make sure that you keep the title relevant to what the link is. The example above is a title for a link about web design, and the keyword "web design" is in there. Keep it simple but make sure you take advantage of the titles you are incorporating into your website.
Here is an example of a title that won't do much for search engine rankings. "9527 posts with this tag" does not help with rankings for keyword "real estate". For this title to improve search engine rankings it could be changed to something like "9527 posts tagged with real estate".
Headings
Try to use headings wherever you can because they will help reinforce what a specific page is about and which search terms are relevant to that page. If your website has an informational page on "online calendars", you should put a title before all of the information such as "Online Calendars". However, instead of making it a title in big bold text you should make it a header.
Here is an example of how the code would look before and after:
Before: <b>Online Calendars</b>
After: <h1>Online Calendars</h1>
Title and Meta Tags
Title and meta tags are very important for making your pages look unique to search engines. If search engines see pages as duplicate then they will not rank those pages. Make sure you use unique title and meta tags, and keep them short and descriptive.
Here is an example from edgeio.com which should be returning far more results than it really is. Edgeio.com has 266,000 pages however the search engines are not seeing them as unique and therefore not ranking them when they should.
Edgeio has numerous product listing pages and here is an example of what they could do to each page in order for them to be seen as unique:
<title>Edgeio - 2 Bedroom Apartment in New York</title> <meta name="description" content="2 bedroom and 2 bathroom apartment in New York City for $1000 a month." />
The example above uses both a title and meta description tag. Make sure that you use both, otherwise your pages may still be seen as duplicates.
Code is one of the first things you should tackle. You have a lot of control over this aspect of your website and it is something you can start working on immediately. Some parts of the code are more difficult to optimize and may take longer, but the more you do the better your chances are of getting ranked. Also, make sure that everything you do is natural and not overdoing it. The last thing you need is for the search engines to think you are spamming, which could be very detrimental to your website and business.
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