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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.