The title is the king of your content. It is the first thing web surfer looks at. It must be concise, informative, and eye catching. Google displays only up to 66 characters of a title. Therefore, it’s a good idea to keep your titles short. However, don’t restrict yourself to 66 characters only. Give include all the necessary information in your titles.
Sitemaps are extremely important. And I can’t stress this enough. A sitemap is a list of all the pages present on your website. For search engines to index all of your pages, you need to create a sitemap of your website and submit it to all the major search engines. There are tools that generate sitemaps for you. But it is a long topic, which we have discussed in more detail in previous posts. In fact, these topics are covered in a SEO Series.
This is a small, but very useful tip. Most people overlook it. Give your images and videos meaningful file names before uploading them to your website. For example, instead of using a name like image007 for the intro image, I have named it “top 20 SEO tips”. This helps in better search ranking and is a good SEO practice.
To help search engines better index your webpages, you can add a file named robots.txt in your site’s root directory. In that file, add a command “User-agent: *” (without quotes). What this does is, it invites bots to freely crawl pages on your website.
Anchor texts can be as important as the links themselves. Use keywords instead of using statements like “click here” for links. It is a good SEO practice. Secondly, if you are linking to the same page multiple times, use different anchor text each time. Same anchor texts give the impression that the links have been automated. Search engines don’t like auto-bots. That is the main reason why purchasing backlinks is discouraged, because they use the same anchor texts for your website everywhere.
No follow is a good way of filtering lower quality websites that you are linking to so that it doesn’t look like you are giving away backlinks. It also helps in maintaining a good sites-linking-to-you / sites-to-which-you-are-linking ratio. This ratio can seriously effect your Page rankings. Generally, put a rel=”nofollow” attribute to links that go out to lower quality websites. Also, never add nofollow to any of your own pages.
Image optimization is an essential part of SEO as well. People search for images almost as much as they search for text. Hence it is very important that you make the images on your site easier to find. Always add titles to your images. Search Engines look for titles. Add ALT tags as well. These help in user-accessibility. People who are visually impaired use special browsers to use the internet. These browsers spell out an image’s alt description for such people. Hence, add this attribute to help your disabled fellows.
Search engines love fresh content. But then again, who doesn’t? People are looking for new content every time they visit your website. Whenever I visit any site, the first thing I look for is the time stamp under the latest post. That gives a very good idea of how frequently a website is updated. Service websites don’t need to be updated so frequently. But content related sites and blogs must be updated frequently. For blogs, a post frequency of at least one post per day is very important. The more, the merrier. But try to write at least one post per day. It makes your site look fresh, and also improves your Alexa rank. And the more the topics you have written on, the more traffic you’ll get.
A slow loading blog does not fare very well with readers. You’d think search robots would have no problem with this. But unfortunately, that isn’t true. And it’s logical too. Google has to return millions of search results in a split second. It does not like a site bogging down its search bot. Do not upload too many heavy files to your blogs. Rather, upload big files on sharing websites, and provide your readers with a direct download link. For more information about how to reduce blog load time, check out the article below.
Reducing bounce rate is key to your blog’s success. Bounce rate is the amount of people who leave your website during the first few seconds of their visit. The lower, the better. Blog load time can effect this rate. But the most important factor is website design. An attractive and elegant design will retain visitors, while a website which is difficult to navigate, is cluttered up with ads, or has faulty design will lose visitors quickly. Of course, the content quality and frequency also play a part. So work on those areas and reduce your bounce rate.
Typography refers to your content styling. Who doesn’t appreciate good styling? Good includes things like italicizing or bolding text, proper line spacing, headings, padding etc. Work on these to make your content look good and easily readable.