on page optimization ii

On Page Optimization – II

By

Bala Abirami

Document Name Training Material

Document Code QMS-TEM-OT 08

Version 1.0

Date 26-Feb-2008

Created By Ms. Padmavathy

Reviewed BY SPG

Approved By Mr. Vijay

# Version Date Rationale for change Change Description

1 1.0 26-Feb-2008 Initial Version

2

Revision HIstory

Agenda

• Content Optimization

• Design Suggestions

• URL Structure and File Naming

• Sitemap

• Robots.txt

• Nofollow Attribute

• Source Code optimization

Content Optimization

• Content is the king.• It is the key to search engine rankings. • Visitors will spend time only when the content is more attractive

and much informative. • It is an important factor in search engine algorithm for ranking

websites.

Importance of Content optimization• Unique and well-written. • With informative Content Comes Even More Links • Search Engines give more importance to fresh content

Unique and Well Written Content

• The search engine spiders are looking for unique content. • The visitors are looking for well-written content.

What does your audience want to find? • Writing content that will both grab your visitor's attention and at the

same time, make them want, what you have to offer.

Additional research• If you fail to address all their questions, your visitors may very well

leave your site in search of the answer. • Find all the information that you can and make sure that you include

as much as possible on your site.

Content Contd…

With Informative Content Comes Even More Links

• If you provide great information that people will find useful they will link to it naturally.

• There are still webmasters who will link to sites for no other reason than they feel their visitors will be interested in it's content.

Content Optimization Contd…

• Include your Targeted Search Terms • Checking Keyword Density • Checking Keyword Proximity • Checking Keyword Frequency• Checking Keyword Prominence • Relationship of Body Text Content to Keywords • Heading Tags • Special Text

• Inline Text Links

Keyword Density

• Keyword density refers to the ratio (percentage) of the number of times a keyword or phrase appears compared to the total number of words in a page .

• keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase.

• The more times the keyword appears in relation to the total number of on page words, the greater the overall keyword density.

• Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search consider keyword density as part of their search algorithm

• Keyword density in body text - 5 to 10%• Keyword Density = Number of times the keyword used in the page /

Total Number of Words in the page * 100

Keyword Proximity

• Keyword proximity refers to the closeness between two or more keywords. In general, the closer the keywords are, the better.

• For example:

How Keyword Density Affects Search Engine Rankings

How Keyword Density Affects Rankings In Search Engine

• Using the example above, if someone searched for "search engine rankings," a web page containing the first sentence is more likely to

rank higher than the second.

Keyword Prominence

• Keyword prominence refers to how prominent keywords are within a web page.

• The general recommendation is to place important keywords at, or near, the start of a web page, sentence, TITLE or META tag.

Keyword Frequency

• Keyword frequency refers to the number of times a keyword or keyword phrase appears within a web page.

• The most important keyword or keyword phrase is the most frequently use keywords in a web page.

• The more times a keyword or keyword phrase appears within a web page, the more relevance a search engine is likely to give the page

for a search with those keywords.

• But be careful not to abuse the system by repeating the same keyword or keyword phrases over and over again.

Heading Tags

• The <h1> to <h6> tags define headers. <h1> defines the largest header, <h6> defines the smallest header.

• After Title Tag, Header tags are the next most important placement of your keywords.

• <h1> tags holds the greatest weight of the entire heading tags, its purpose is to act as the primary heading of the page.<h2> acts a sub-heading for the page.

• If you need to use another heading tag use the <H2> tag, and so on. But its better not to use more that 2 heading tags in a web page.

• If you use heading tags irresponsibly you run the risk of having your website penalized for spam

Relationship of Body Text Content to Keywords

• Relevance of text on the page compared to targeted keywords.

• Using semantically related terms allows you to help associate your page with other topical pages and helps your page rank for many long tail keywords.

• This should also coincide with the theme of the links pointing to the site.

Special Text

• This includes bold, underlined, colored, highlighted, sizing and italic.

• Search engines give more importance to bold and italics.

• The first is to draw the eye to the words and to create a brand.

• The second purpose is to add weight to the "Search Engine Positioning” of the keywords.

• Common sense and a reasonable grasp of sales and marketing techniques should be your guide in establishing what should and should not be drawn out with "special text".

Inline Text Links

• Inline text links are links added right into text within your content.

• The first is to give the reader a quick and easy way to find the information you are referring to.

• The second purpose of this technique is to give added weight to this phrase for the page on which the link is located and also to give weight to the target page.

• An additional benefit to inline text links is that you can help direct your visitors to the pages you want them on.

Dont’s

• Don’t use Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content

• Don't bury your keyword-rich content at the bottom of the page.

• Don't overdo things.

• Don't go overboard with the use of "H1" tags or bolded text

Design Suggestions

• Make a site with a clear navigation and text links. Avoid more than two sub-directory levels.

• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.

• Make sure that your TITLE attributes and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate. Avoid Empty Image Alt Attribute

• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Design Suggestions Contd..

• Avoid Splash Pages.

• Avoid Non-spiderable Flash Menus• Avoid Image and Flash Content

Design Suggestions Contd..

• Avoid dynamic URLs. Use Mod-rewrite to overcome this problem.

• Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to implement a clean design throughout your web site. This will reduce the time to implement a consistent text (or layout) style for your web site.

• Reduce image size - too many images or very large images on your web page will slow down the loading time of your web site. Slice large images into smaller pieces.

• http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/index.html

• Check the Browser compatibility of the website

Design Suggestions Contd..

• Insert the DOC TYPE tag at the top of every web page.

• Search engines have difficulties indexing framed pages because the URL of the page is the same, no matter which of the separate frames is open. http://www.webmarketingplus.co.uk/examples/frameset1.html

• Animation and Movies - Provide search engines with a HTML version of the Flash movie but in this case make sure that you have excluded the original Flash movie from indexing.

• Clean html code - web site editors often write extra code. This can increase the loading time of your web pages. Check your html code by running it through a validator.

Design Suggestions Contd..

Overuse of Ajax• Ajax content is loaded dynamically, so it is not spiderable or

indexable by search engines. • Not judiciously create unique, bookmarkable (and therefore

indexable) URLs.

Design Suggestions Contd..

Outgoing links

• Link only to good sites.• Do not link to link farms • Use nofollow to the outgoing links

Broken Links

Check your broken and dead link using the tool http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

File Naming and URL Structure

•The filename should contain the keywords.

•Use hyphens to separate your keywords in the file name.

•Next comes Underscores. Underscore can be hard to see in the address bar so your visitors may mistake it for a space and mistype your URL in the future.

•And then Pluses (+), They are mostly used in special circumstances like dynamic content.Eg., http://www.netscape.com/tag/seo+india

•Don’t use Uppercase letters while naming files•Don’t use spaces while naming files

URL Structure

Static URL

A static URL is a page address for which the contents of the web page stay the same unless the changes are hard-coded without calling a script.

E.g. http://www.mydomain.com/static_url

Dynamic URL

A dynamic URL is a page address that results from the search of a database-driven web site or the URL of a web site that runs a dynamic script like PHP or JavaScript.

E.g..  http://www.mydomain.com/forums/thread.php?threadid=12345&sort=date

Advantages of Static URL over Dynamic

Static URL Dynamic URL

Search Engine Friendly Not search engine friendly

Keywords can be used in the URL Keywords cannot be used in the URL

Easier for the end-user to view and understand what the page is about.

Not easier for end user

Indexed more quickly in search engines

Take more time to get indexed

Best URL Practice

1. Describe Your Content2. Keep it Short 3. Use static URLs

4. Descriptives are Better than Numbers ( instead of 114/cat223/ you can use /brand/adidas/ )

5. Never use multiple subdomains (e.g., siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com)

6. Better use Fewer Folders - http://www.newyorkmetro.com/fashion/fashionshows/2007/spring/

main/newyork/womenrunway/marcjacobs/ 7. Stick with a single URL format throughout the site.

Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a text file you put on your site to tell search robots which pages you would like them not to visit.

Need for robots.txt• If you have two versions of a page for eg.printer friendly version of a page.• If you want some pages not get indexed by search engines.• If you want to save some bandwidth by excluding images, stylesheets and

javascript from indexing• Can be used for blocking bad robots.• Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-

generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.

Where to include: • It must be in the main directory because otherwise user agents will not be

able to find it and index the whole site.

Sitemap

• A Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website.

Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:• Your site has dynamic content. • Your site has pages that aren't easily discovered by the bots during

the crawl process - for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or Flash. • Your site is new and has few links to it. (Bots crawls the web by

following links from one page to another, so if your site isn't well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)

• Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

HTML Sitemap

HTML Sitemap

• It allows easier indexing of your site by the search engines.

• Sitemaps help with usability and site navigation for users.

Examples of Good site maps:• Apple sitemap • A more detailed 4-column sitemap• Site maps for Small sites small sitemaps • Ecommerce Sitemap ecommerce sitemap

XML sitemap

XML sitemap

• Google adheres to Sitemap Protocol 0.9 as defined by sitemaps.org.

• We have to include the file sitemap.xml. Types of Sitemap • Video Sitemaps• Mobile Sitemaps • News Sitemaps • Code Search Sitemaps • Geo Sitemaps• Size -50,000 urls, 10 MB. If it exceeds the size then sitemap index

file can be created (1,000 Sitemaps )

No Follow Attribute

• The rel="nofollow" is an attribute you can set on an HTML <a> link tag

• Introduced by Google for avoiding blog comment Spam.

• Tells a search engine "Don't follow this link.“

Code: <a href="http://www.site.com/page.html" rel="nofollow">Visit My

Page</a>

• The links placed inside this tag won’t get any credit when search engine ranks website in the search results.

Source Code Optimization

• Keep your code simple and short.

• Place CSS and JavaScript in external files and reference them as needed. Placing the script code in an external file reduces the code to just one line.

• Avoid Fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, AJAX, frames, DHTML, or Flash

• Consistently use the simplest URLs. Link to "/" instead of "/index.php" or "/news/" instead of "/news/index.php".

• Run your code through a validator and keep it clean