Tips to Optimize New Website

Top 10 Tips to Optimize New Website & 6 Tips for Back-linking! As it is said that "Necessity is the mother of all inventions", one of my clients wanted my advice as what are the points to be considered while optimizing a new website for Search Engines. So, even though I know what points will make a new website completely optimized, here is a list of guidelines that can be called as SEO tips for new web sites or what ever the users want to call it.

Below are the points that can be followed while starting an Optimizing process for a new website:

Keyword Research: First and foremost, we need to see what the Keywords are that need to be targeted and related to niche of a website. Here we can use online tools such as Digitalpoint keyword Suggestion Tool.

Site Categories: Categories of the site need to be made according to the avenues of its business. For example: There can be categories such as Products, Services, Support, Faqs etc.

Web site Directory Structure: Target specific keywords for pages on directory structure. Specific KWs here need to be generic words such as Medical Billing, Medical Transcription etc.

File names: The File names need to be inclined towards the targeted keywords. As mentioned above the targeted KWs for example, should be generic keywords.

Titles, Metatags - Meta Description, Meta Keywords tags: Ideally, there should be 10 words on Title, 25 Words on Description and the size of 25Kb should not be exceeded for any given webpage.

If you are unable to remember these while creating Titles and Meta Tags for your Web Page, then use this Google Snippet Optimizer/Builder Tool.

The Title and Metatags should start with Keywords and need to have key phrases in them. For instance, Medical Billing in India, Medical Transcription in India, Medical Billing in Chennai, Medical Transcription in Chennai etc., the file name can be given as /medical-billing-chennai.html etc.

Sitemaps: There are two types of Sitemaps that should be used for any new website. These are Sitemap.html within a website and the other one is Google Sitemap as Sitemap.xml in xml format. The xml based sitemap can be generated using any of the available online sitemap generating tool. Sitemap.html page will have only links with all the inner pages of a website. These two are to make the pages saturated on the search engine databases called as Search Engine Saturation.

Body Content: This is the main factor that a website needs to have to convert visitors to sale or to just make a better site stickiness for the users. Here, we need to use any of the online LSI tools, like the one that I use from Quintura LSI Tool to make a copy of a web page more relevant to the website. Quintura search engine works the way people search and its LSI tool evaluates latent semantic terms.
Each page should have atleast 3 text links (anchored texts) to the inner pages that are relevant to the context of a page.
Navigation should be consistent and run through the site's pages. Most important pages need to be linked from the index page that includes the Sitemap.html.

Positioning Body Content on a web page: Here, it is better to understand a little bit about how a search engine spider sees a web page while scanning it. Search engines read pages like we do, from top to bottom. It also assumes that the content near the top of the page is more important than the content at the bottom of the page. The text at the top of a page receives more weight than the text at the bottom. Hence it is better to shift the unnecessary code such as the navigation links as on Side bar menu etc., to the bottom of the page.

While Coding Web Pages: While coding WebPages for a website, calling external CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) can be used to minimize the amount of code on WebPages and is beneficial website optimization process. Also, CSS should use a different style sheet for mobile visitors, not a different site. Such style sheets are not particularly difficult to construct, they were covered that Matt Cutts reviewed on Dev Articles.

Back Links: Last but not the least! this is one of the most important factors that many of the Search Engines consider to weigh a website. Following are a Top 6 Handy tips for increasing backlinks for new web sites. You should check for websites that offer backlinks without a NoFollow Tag to your website. This makes the link value (Link Juice) flow from site A to Site B. If you want to know about a website, whether or not it offers links without a Nofollow tag, then try this Nofollow Checker Tool.

1. Submit your site to Web Directories: This is a pretty monotonous process that can get you several hundred backlinks if you have the time. An alternative would be to hire a manual directory submitter. Here’s a list of web directories you can use. You can also find some blog directories here.

2. Offering your Expertise: As most of the entrepreneurs have a specific skill set such as Medical Billing techniques, Translation, web design, copywriting, SEO etc., they can write to an established website and offer to optimise their website in return for a listing on their webpage. This offers excellent branding when it is picked up by a website with a good traffic to their site.

3. Submit Press Releases to PR sites: A basic press release about your website’s launch can be released to several PR websites, who will distribute it to various online news outlets. A good way to get a free link that I recommend is to submit industry related articles at PRWeb and PRLeap. There are many more that were been collected can be accessed from my website that is created to Build Brands where the list will be uploaded soon.

4. Social Bookmarking, Polling or Voting Websites: Many social polling websites like Technorati or Digg are often crawled by search engines each day and their links do help to get any website indexed easily. These Voting sites combines social bookmarking, blogging and RSS where the users decide which story gets on the front page by voting. 3spots is one of the biggest lists of social voting and bookmarking websites can be use for more information.

5. Signature on Forums: Forums in business niche can be started and contributions to their discussions can be done. Insert a link to the homepage or some inner pages of your site to those forums postings.

6. Blogs: Use the popular Blogs that you have or set up a new blog on different blog networks like Wordpress.com, Blogger, typepad etc., post good content each day and Link to specific WebPages on your website with related text links on the page. Also, you can comment on the other's Blogs and do some Guest postings on the PRs that are blog postings.

Useful Links: 10 SEO Tips and tags, h1, bolds, keywords, content items fixed (Highrankings Forum).

So, have you decided to optimize your new website? Then Go ahead and do it. Do you have any clarifications? Then Email Me.

Cheers! Narasimhan

SEO Myths Vs Reality

Jill Whalen is a pioneer in search engine optimization. Nicknamed the First Lady of Search, Jill founded the site HighRankings.com in 1995.

In her presentation for Webstock, Jill diffused some of the most common SEO myths, including:

1) PPC ads will help organic rankings. Wrong.

2) PPC ads will hurt organic rankings. Wrong again!

3) you must have a keyword-rich domain. Nope.

4) you must have keyword-rich page URLs. No need.

5) heading tags are necessary (H1, H2 etc.). Not at all.

6) the keywords in your meta keywords tag need to be included in your page content. It is actually better to use the keyword tag to include misspellings and other keyword varieties that you don't have in the visible text on your pages.

7) using keywords in comment tags will hurt your rankings. No.

8 ) page copy must be a certain # of words. Jill actually made up the 250 word limit a few years ago and it's stuck, but there is really no set limit to please search engines.

9) that you need to bold/italicize your target keywords within the page. No point.

10) that you must use a specific keyword density. No. Jill says that keyword density tools are ridiculous!

11) that you must optimize a page for a single keyword or phrase per page. Waste! Instead, try to optimize each page for 3-5 phrases that are related, so that your copy reads better than repeating one phrase over and over.

12) that you need to optimize for the long-tail searches. You don't generally need to optimize for these - engines will find them on their own.

13) duplicate content will get your site penalized. There is not a penalty as such, but engines will filter out duplicates in lieu of the original copy (or what they think is the original).

14) your HTML code must validate to W3C. Not true. Google doesn't even validate!

15) your navigation must be text links not images. Surprisingly, graphical navigation is fine as long as you use ALT tags.

16) you can't use Flash. It's fine to use Flash, as long as it is one element of your page, not a complete Flash site.

17) certain design techniques are black hat. For example, Javascript code is legitimate, not just used by black hats.

18) that Google's link: command is accurate. It's not a useful tool. Use Google Webmaster Tools or the Yahoo link command instead.

19) that reciprocal links won't count. From the right site, reciprocal links are fine, even very helpful.

20) that pages are ranked in PageRank order in search results. They're not. Google Toolbar PageRank is not accurate anyway so ignore it.

21) you must be in DMOZ or Yahoo Directory to get good GG rankings. It's just not true. Jill says the Yahoo Directory is not worth the money these days.

22) that you need to submit URLs to engines. Provided you have a link to your site, you will be indexed.

23) that you need a Google Sitemap. This is not needed for the average site. It won't change your site rank.

24) that you need to update your site frequently. Not necessary.

25) frequent spidering helps rankings. Not true!

26) that you need multiple sites. Won't help in the engines and creates more maintenance work.

27) that you need doorway pages. That's so 1995!

28) that a #1 ranking will always lead to more traffic/sales. The good rankings need to be for keywords and phrases that people are actually searching for.

29) that an SEO company can place pages in certain positions. Not possible, unless they're using PPC or sponsored spots.

30) that your rankings will tank if you stop paying the company. Rubbish!

31) that they have a "proprietary method" of SEO. They're lying.

32) that they have a "special relationship" with Google. They're still lying. Google has no relationships with organic SEO companies that Jill is aware of.

33) that they can increase your rankings without doing any on-page work. Run away!

So we should keep these myths top of mind while designing and optimizing our websites.It is said that Jill's presentation was by far the best. It was concise but covered all the important aspects and it was delivered confidently. I even learned a few things. Also said that the audience clearly enjoyed it as they paid close attention and a few attendees approached Jill after the session to ask questions and say thanks, always a good sign. Great stuff!