Improving Your Ranking on the Search Engines
This article was initially written for a website client that I consulted with about improving their search engine ranking. The name of the company and the type of service has been changed to that of a fictitious Seattle website design company. The "tags" referred to below are part of the hidden HTML code that makes up a website.
Recommendations for website optimization
Search Engine overview – How a site is ranked on the search engines involves a complex mixture of algorithms, a little human interaction, and often a lot of trial and error. And unfortunately, there are never any guarantees when it comes to getting your website listed (unless you choose to pay for a "sponsored" listing). In most cases, however, a website will be listed, although not necessarily near the top. For a website that focuses on a very specific and less-common field it can be much easier to rank near the top since there is less competition. The challenge for any website is simply focusing the relevant text and hidden keywords enough that they will list your site prominently. In your case, it's suggested that, since you're a Seattle website design company, you focus your keywords on variations of "Seattle", "website", and "design". These are the words that the average user is likely to use when searching for a website design company in Seattle.
Title tag – The title tag is a good opportunity to get in some specific keywords, rather than simply listing the title of the company.
- Problem - Currently the title tag on the home page says "Johnson Design. Number one in our field".
- Recommendation – To be more descriptive, and to incorporate more words that people would use when searching for a website design company, it's suggested that the title tag be changed to something like "Johnson website Design Company. Seattle's leading website design business."
Description tag - It is suggested by many in the field that the description tag not exceed 250 characters, including spaces. Do not use this tag to cram in keywords. Instead, write short, coherent sentences, avoiding "meaningless" promotional words.
- Problem - Currently the description tag on your home page has over 400 characters. Additionally, some of the words that are used have more of a promotional intent, which gains nothing when it comes to the search engines. For instance, your site currently includes phrases such as "Number one company in our field. Great designs for the small business."
- Recommendation – Narrow down description tag and make more concise. Try to limit "promotional" or filler phrases as much as possible, instead incorporate words and phrases that will gain you something in the search engines. For instance, instead of "Number one company in our field. Great designs for the small business", you may want to try "Seattle's leading website design company, offering outstanding website design for the small business." By doing this you've incorporated more occurrences of "website design" and "Seattle website design", as well as combinations of "small business and website design."
Keyword tag – It is suggested that the keyword tag in your website not exceed 1024 characters, including spaces. Try to avoid excessive use of the same word or phrase.
Keyword tags are not nearly as crucial in search engine optimization as they once were, since they were often abused. Still, it doesn't hurt to put them in.
- Problem - Currently your site uses over 1600 characters, including spaces. A number of words and phrases are repeated quite often.
- Recommendation – Cut keywords down to 1024 characters, including spaces. You can get more keywords into the allotted space by removing the space after each comma. Instead of "web design, website design" put "web design,website design" (with no space after the comma). It looks wrong, of course, but it's perfectly acceptable, since this code is not seen by humans.
- There is no specific limit, but it's recommended by some in the field that you not use the same word/phrase more than 5 times (this is obviously difficult). Be sure to use variations of a word or phrase, inverted phrases, plurals, as well as common misspellings ("website design, website design, website designers").
Page Text – Home Page - It's recommended that the home page have at least 200 hundred words of concise, descriptive text in order for the search engines to get a good idea of what the page and site is about.
- Problem - Currently your website's home page has no descriptive text, only links to other pages. This text is readable, but likely does not give as clear a picture to the search engines as you would like.
- Recommendation - Write new descriptive welcome/intro text, giving a brief overview of your website design services. This text should incorporate your primary keywords ("website design, Seattle website design, Seattle website designer".) as many times as possible.
Page Text – Sub-pages – Like the home page, the sub-pages should have as much descriptive text as possible.
- Problem – The sub-pages have a number of occurrences of your pertinent keywords, but perhaps not enough text overall to improve your ranking. There are a lot of "promotional" phrases such as "We offer the greatest service" and "the top in our field", yet as far search engines are concerned, these phrases are meaningless.
- Recommendation – Write more descriptive text for each page; elaborate more on the short "promo" phrases. Perhaps instead of "we offer the greatest service" use "Johnson website Design offers the finest web design services in the Seattle area." Again, this has added more occurrences of "website design" and "Seattle", which will help you in the search engines.
Redundant Links
- Problem – Some of the most important links on your website, those to the left of the page in the navigation area, include JavaScript code that is not readable by the search engines. Therefore, some of your most important pages on your website may be getting missed since the code can not read through these links to get to the next page.
- Recommendation - It's not necessary to replace these links since they add a nice visual element to the site. Instead, I suggest you add redundant text links to the footer area of each page. This not only helps with search engines, but can make your site more user-friendly by allowing the website visitor to choose a different page without scrolling back to the top.
The above article focuses on the term "website design Seattle," yet for this particular category there can be two spelling variations. Many people spell "website design" as "website design" (without the space between "web" and "site".
