An important part of promoting your website online is to have it listed by search engines in their search results. The higher positions in the search engine results you get, the more clicks and traffic you will have…for FREE!
The key to having good rankings in free searches is the so-called “search engine optimization” (for short SEO) which starts by having your site indexed by search engines, goes through optimizing your content for search engines and then building valuable links to it. Google has the most dynamically changing algorithm to consider for search engine optimization so often when we talk about SEO factors, we mean factors that will affect most of all your Google rankings.
1. Metadata:
When designing your website, each page contains a space between the
tags to insert metadata, or information about the contents of your page. If you have a CMS site, the UMC web team will have pre-populated this data for you:a). Title Metadata:
Title metadata is responsible for the page titles displayed at the top of a browser window. It is the most important metadata on your page. For those with a CMS website, the web team has developed an automated system for creating the meta title for each web page.
b). Description Metadata:
Description metadata is the textual description that a browser will use in your page search return. Think of it as your site’s window display—a concise and appealing description of what is contained within, with the goal of encouraging people to enter.
c). Keyword Metadata:
Keyword metadata are the search phrases that people type when they want to find your page. You’ll want to include a variety of phrases. However, don’t get greedy: if your list becomes excessive, the browser may completely ignore the data. As a general rule, try to keep it to about 6-8 phrases with each phrase consisting of 1-4 words. A great example would be “computer science degree.”
2. Publish Relevant Content:
Quality content is the number one driver of your search engine rankings and there is no substitute for target content. Quality content created specially for your intended user increases site traffic, which improve your site’s authority and relevance.
Don’t forget to use bold, italics, heading tags, and other emphasis tags to highlight keyword phrases, but don’t overdo it. Never sacrifice good writing for SEO. The best pages are written for the user, not for the search engine.
3. Update Your Content Regularly:
You’ve probably noticed that we feel pretty strongly about content. Search engines do, too. Regularly updated content is viewed as one of the best indicators of a site’s relevancy, so be sure to keep it fresh. User want latest news that is happening around us so we have to provide update content regularly.
4. Links Pointing to your Websites:
By pointing links to your website you can improve your website google search engine ranking. One of the factors that contribute to a web page being considered “important” is the number of links pointing to that page. For example, if your page has 100 quality links leading to it, it will be ranked higher (in Google’s estimation) than one that only has 20.
Anyway, in general, since Google ranks your pages according to the number of links pointing at your page, your site will do better if it has more links pointing to it.
5. Your Page Must Have the Words you Think People Will Search for:
Besides the title tag, if you want your website to feature in Google’s results when someone searches for a set of words, say “Widget X”, those words must actually occur on your page. Think about it from the point of view of a search engine. If you don’t put the words “Widget X” somewhere on the page, how is the search engine supposed to know that the page deals with that topic? The search engine is not a human being who can draw inferences from the general tone and content of the page. Even if it can handle some synonyms, you’re going to compete with other sites who have specifically placed those words on their site.
6. Use a Search Engine Site Map:
Although not strictly necessary, if you find that Google (or Bing, for that matter) is not able to discover some pages on your website, create a site map. While such a site map does not guarantee that Google will index and list every page, it will at least help it discover those missing pages if your site design is such that it has impeded the search engine from finding them before.
7. Check Your Robots.txt File:
Like all respectable search engines, Google will read and obey a special text file on your website called the “robots.txt” file. You can control where search engines are allowed to go with this file. A corollary of this is that you can also inadvertently block the search engine from going to certain parts of your site. It’s generally a good idea to create a robots.txt file for your website, even if it’s an empty file with zero bytes (which means that search engines are allowed to index everything on your site).
8. ALT text on images:
If you have been placing images on your website without bothering to place ALT text, now is a good time to add them. An “ALT text” (or alternate text) is just a way of putting a brief description (using words) of what your picture shows. They are needed by the software used by the blind so that they know what’s in the picture. Since all search engines, including Google, are essentially blind, relying on words, they also need the ALT text. The description you give in the ALT text is treated like the words occurring on your web page, although I don’t know if they are regarded as being of equal importance.
9. Be Careful Whom You Hire:
Google’s use of links to rank a website has at least 2 side effects on the Internet. Firstly, people seeking to rank higher have engaged companies to furnish them with zillions of links. Those companies presumably set up a whole bunch of sites for the sole purpose of linking to their clients. Secondly, as a response to this, the Google programmers have retaliated (and continue to do so) by discrediting links from such “link networks” as well as penalising the sites that pay them for the service.
It’s apparently possible to run afoul of this even if you have no intention of buying links. For example, if you are not careful, and have engaged a search engine optimisation (“SEO”) company to improve your site’s performance on Google, and they use a link network, your site may inadvertently get caught in the crossfire of this ongoing war between the link networks and Google.
10. Dynamic Pages and Google:
If you have a dynamically generated page that you think should be indexed, just make sure you put a link to it somewhere on your site. This applies to all web pages that you want indexed anyway, so even if you don’t understand what I mean by “dynamic page”, it doesn’t matter. Make sure that all the pages of your site can be found through at least one link on your site. If they are not linked to from somewhere, no one will be able to find it, neither Google nor your visitors (unless they are psychic).
11. Use alt tag:
If you have been placing images on your website without bothering to place ALT text, now is a good time to add them. An “ALT text” (or alternate text) is just a way of putting a brief description (using words) of what your picture shows. They are needed by the software used by the blind so that they know what’s in the picture. Since all search engines, including Google, are essentially blind, relying on words, they also need the ALT text. The description you give in the ALT text is treated like the words occurring on your web page, although I don’t know if they are regarded as being of equal importance.