Making your website SEO Friendly – Part 1

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First, I would like to emphasize to my users that Search Engine Optimization is not a onetime activity, nor it is about mindless link building. It is a very strategy based activity, where you need to understand the objective of your website, set goals accordingly, prepare strategies and work towards them.

Here in this post I am not going to tell you about usual SEO stuff. I will be telling about different stages of an SEO campaign.

An SEO Campaign is carried out in 3 Stages:

  • Post website development or Website Conceptualization Stage
  • During website development
  • After website development
  • Ongoing SEO Activities.

SEO: Post Website Development or Website Conceptualization Stage

Website Objective: What you want to achieve through your website. There can be different objectives to achieve:

  • Branding
  • Website Traffic
  • Product Selling
  • Email/Lead Capturing
  • A Combination of more than one objectives

Every webmaster have their own set of objectives, this is important to determine, to get better results in next stage, i.e. keyword research.

Keyword Research: Let me explain why first step was important. To target best keywords for your website, you need to identify the need or intent of the website user. Say a user searched “Samsung Galaxy S5”. Here the intent is not clear. He could be planning to buy one, or might be checking on its features, or wanting to buy online and looking for a website that sells it, or looking for a manual to operate the phone.

If you target “Samsung Galaxy S5” as a keyword, you have to face competition from website from all websites that have “Samsung Galaxy S5” in their content (eCommerce Websites, Review Websites, etc.). But if you target a keyword like “Samsung Galaxy S5 price in India”, you will be cutting down on a lot of competition. Makes sense!

Domain Selection: Based on the Keyword Research, you should choose your domain name, unless your objective for creating the website is branding.

Choosing Web Server: Ofcourse the server should have very good speed, very good uptime record, backup and restoration facility, etc. Also, importantly if you are targeting a local area, say Delhi, it is advised to have your web server in Delhi or atleast in India. There are many logics behind it:

  1. Google takes into account the location of server in case of Geotargeting (Geographical SEO Ranks)
  2. If first reason is not enough, at least your target audience will be able to load your website faster.
  3. In case of any issue, you can easily reach out to the service provider and have proper communication. Let me share a personal example here, we are located in Delhi and we hosted some of our websites on a server managed by a Chennai based company. The server was good, but whenever some issue arises it was difficult to communicate, because of language barriers.

What platform should be used: The other most important factor to consider the development platform. You need to consult a Technical person or your project manager. Prior to this you need to be clear of what features are all required, how you want your website to be managed and the cost you can bear. Based on this information your technical/project manager should be able to give you a good advice. Depending on your requirements, the platform should be flexible and scalable. Means it should be created in a way that any other feature or third party apps can be integrated with it, secondly, it should have the ability to increase the pages/posts and other content types.

Information Architecture or Content Hierarchy: This is an important step, as it will help the website developer to create the website accordingly, and to keep your website in tune right from the beginning. Plan your navigational menu well depending on the content hierarchy, as it will help you better convert your website visitors.

Page Layout: You should discuss this with your web designer. Depending on your requirement he should come up with few mockups which you can brainstorm with your marketing team decide to go with.

Study Competitor Strategy: To counter your competition you need to understand what your competitor is doing, and what he is doing right to stay in competition. You have to do a complete SWOT Analysis of your competition, and identify the key areas where you can beat them. It can be right keyword selection, correct content flow on the website, correct layout of pages that converts well, the color combinations and aesthetics of the website, the ease of use, its reach, branding activities, etc.

Making your website SEO Friendly – Part 2

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SEO: During Website Development

During website development, you should request your web designer/developer/project manager to keep in mind SEO friendliness of the website. There are several factors to keep in mind:

Responsive Design: If the budget permits you should have a responsive design, it helps in targeting a wider base of audience.

Website URL Structure: This refers to the URLs of your sub-pages and sub-sub-page, blogs, etc. For example:

Sub Page URL: /samsung-galaxy-s5/
Sub Sub Page URL: /samsung-galaxy-s5/price-in-india/
Sub Sub Page URL: /samsung-galaxy-s5/specifications/
Blog URL: /smart-phones/samsung-galaxy-s5-review-2014/ (category/blog-tilte)

Consult your SEO Manager regarding the suitable website structure to use. The basic idea is to use keywords in your URLs wisely.

Use of Tags: Provide title tags, description, alt tags for images, for each and every page individually, so that when the person uploads the content, it is uploaded with all SEO elements correctly.

H-Tags: Ask them to design the layout in a way that it respects the heading hierarchy, i.e. main page title should be H1, the sub-heads H2, etc.

Internal Linking: Adopt the practice of making good use of Anchor Texts for interlinking the content within the website.

Optimize Image Size: Optimize image size, if you can get away with a 50KB version of the image, don’t use 500 MB version. Also, define the width and height attribute of the images wherever it is ued. Ex: <img src=”image-url” width=”200px” height=”200px”/>

404 Redirects: Setup 404 Redirect, so that if any broken link appears it should go to proper page.A broken link nowhere to go degrade the ranking of the website.

Use nofollow: Use nofollow in header so that any external link are not followed by search engine from your website.

Robots.txt: Use robots.txt to block bots to index any directory/folder that you don’t want to get indexed.

.htaccess: Configure .htaccess file for canonical URLs and other configurations to load website faster.

SEO: After Website Development, Before Final Launch

Checklist of things to consider before opening the website for search engines.

  • All pages have proper Title Tags (within 65 character limit and targeting the keyword)
  • Check for duplicate content, you can use copyscape.
  • Content is optimized for target keywords for every page
  • No Alt Tags are missing.
  • There are no broken links
  • 404 Redirect is set
  • Canonical URL is set
  • URLs are optimized for target keywords
  • Create Google Analytics Account and Install Google Analytics
  • Create Google Webmasters Account and verify domain
  • Create XML Sitemap and submit it to Google Webmaster
  • Check Google Webmasters tool for 404/500 errors and for other issue like mirror content, etc.
  • Integrate social media if it is in your scheme of things.
  • Claim your business/brand name of Social Media Websites (even if you don’t want to use, atleast block them so that no one else uses it to damage your reputation)
  • Check website speed on gtmetrix, and see if there is scope of improvement in the ratings.

SEO: Ongoing Activities

Analytics/Monitoring: It is important to monitor your website visitor’s activity on your website. Analytics tools provide you good insight into your visitors activity pattern, like which content is read most, which is the worst performing pages, etc. This way you can learn what works well on your website, and which areas to improve on.

Content Building and Promotion: You should constantly add valuable content on your website in form of new blog posts, or new pages about service offerings, latest news about your business, industry reviews, etc. Get account on 1 or 2 good article submission sites and keep posting some articles there as well. Share the blog posts and the articles on your social media pages.

Link Building and Link Removals: If you have done any sort of link building in the past or recently (in form of directory submissions, social bookmarking, bulk article submissions, etc.), the chances are they have not yielded the required results, i.e. rankings. The reason is Google Search Algorithms are smart enough to identify the desperate but mindless efforts to gain search rankings.

Google has even provided Disavow Links tool so that you request Google Webmasters not to consider the bad backlinks created in the past or by some link builder.

The idea is to create links that looks natural, i.e. they should originate within the content area which is relevant to your article/page/post.

Social Media Marketing: Google draws a lot of conclusion from the activity and response on your Social Media Page, so make sure to create right environment on your FB page and get good number of likes not only for your page, but also for the content that you share on it.

How to choose a hosting provider and the hosting package?

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Hosting is an expensive and very important part of your website and its reputation. It affects website availability, load time and search engine rankings. So it is important to take care of certain things while purchasing hosting space for your website. You need to choose a reliable hosting provider, and a suitable hosting package that cater to your requirements. It should neither be unnecessarily expensive for you nor it should be intolerably low on features and performance.

The web servers can be most easily classified as Windows based or Linux based. Usually, websites that uses PHP files need linux based web servers, while the ones using ASP need Windows server, but there are other factors to be taken into consideration. Your web developer will be able to tell you which one you need to host your websites.

Things to know before choosing a hosting provider:

  • Hosting provider should be reliable, easy to reach and available (preferably 24/7)
  • The hosting provider must have good feedback and impressive history in terms of good service and server reliability
  • The web server should be located within your targeted audience’s location. It helps in getting better search engine rankings if you are targeting a local market.
  • Understand the terms of services with your hosting provider, for example, will they be able to restore files and database in case of accidental deletion.
  • Will their control panel (CPanel) will have auto install options for scripts like WordPress, Drupal, Magento, Zen, etc. Most hosting providers provide this.
  • What FTP softwares (Filezilla, CuteFTP, etc.) can be used to access the files on the server.
  • How safe is the server to use online transactions and payment gateways?

Choosing Hosting Package:

  • Estimate your space requirement, and choose accordingly. Consult your web developer on how much space you will be needing to host files.
  • Also take into account the space you need to host your emails.
  • Take into account the monthly bandwidth provided by the provider. Prefer buying the package with unlimited bandwidth. If at all the bandwidth limit exceeds, is there a possibility to upgrade, if yes what extra does your provider charges for it.
  • Similarly, for the hosting space, how much extra you have to pay in case you wish to upgrade the package.
  • Check how many free email accounts the package provides
  • If you are choosing to host your emails elsewhere (like Google Apps, etc.) then you can choose package that comes without emails
  • If you are migrating your website from one hosting provider to another you can ask for free migration of files, DB and emails.
  • Few hosting providers (Net4) charge extra for Database, please be careful and sure before ordering.
  • Check how many Database are provided with the package.

If you intend to host several websites, opt for a package that allows hosting multiple domains, check the package details.

How to Choose a Domain Name for your business?

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  • Allot a budget to your annual domain name spending
  • If .com is available for your business name, book it without any further delay. A .com is still the most popular domain extension. Along with .com you should book domain with several relevant extensions so that no one else reap the benefits of your hard work.

o   You can book domain with other specific domain extensions. For example, if you are serving within a local area, you should book the country specific tld (.uk, .in, .no, etc.).

o   Choose extension based on nature of business, for ex. For a Non Government Organization, you can go for .org, or for an educational institute you should and must book a .edu extension of your domain name.

o   Only protect those domain name extensions which are relevant. Unnecessary spending is not recommended.

  • Keep it sweet and crisp, easy to remember and should reflect what your business is about
  • Try to use keywords or location into your domain. Consult a SEO and Online Branding specialist. It will not only help you in getting better search engine rankings but also help your target audience recognize your business more easily.
  • Avoid using dashes/hyphens, numbers, abbreviations in your domain name.
  • Avoid using words that are difficult to spell for your target audience. Also avoid words where spelling mistakes are common.
  • Try to book it for as long as possible (5 years, 10 years). If you are going to stay in business, it’s a good investment and not even on expensive side.
  • If you have plan to offer your products or services in different countries with different languages, you can opt for booking domains with several local extensions (.uk, .no, .fr, .au)
  • Protect your domain (Read:  How to secure your domain name?)