How to make your website rank higher in search engines and have traffic increase day by day.
This Article will give small things which you can do to have your website well placed to be crawled and indexed by major search engines and also indexed by small website so as to have a dual benefit and ultimately increase relevant converting traffic.
Things to Ponder
1. Remember that your customers always come first! Make your site easy to use and easy to buy from, and you will win a loyal following. Simple, straightforward sites perform best all around. Clearly labeled navigation, informative page content, secure online purchasing and ease of ordering are some key elements to a successful website.
2. The KISS rule: Keep It Simple, Silly. Remember that not every potential customer has broadband internet, many surf the web behind firewalls which will not allow downloads, many have vision problems, and many do not have sound cards. Your pages should load quickly and cleanly in any browser (the most commonly used resolution is 800 x 600), your content and navigation should be in a larger type (font size 2 or greater, 10px or greater), and don’t rely on Flash movies, sound, or downloads.
3. Your index page is hands-down your most important page, for search engines and visitors alike. You have 5 seconds or less to convince someone to stay on your website. Give them a brief text summary of your company, your website, and your products/services. Two or three paragraphs are plenty; save the detail for the inner pages.
4. Do use Meta tags, but use them properly! Meta tags consist of the title, description, and keywords, although there are other tags possible. For SEO, the 3 listed are the most important. Keep them simple and brief. The search engines that still use them have character limits, and also have strict spam rules, so don’t use a keyword more than once. Be specific: “insurance” is unlikely to get you any rankings, but “California life insurance” might, as it is a less competitive term.
5. Don’t use frames. Frames are a convenience for designers, but most search engines hate them, and so do most site visitors.
6. Don’t use a form for your landing page. Forms have little or no useful text content, so they won’t help your rankings (unless you want to rank well for “name and address”!). In general, they do not convert well to sales either. If you want a form on the first page, make sure you still have a couple of paragraphs of informative text.
7. Make sure your site has at least 5 pages of content. Search engines reward you for “site depth”. Many internet consumers will look for certain pages such as the About Us page and Testimonials; these help lend credibility which helps convert to sales, while giving you solid site content. And don’t forget your site map!
8. Every page should, ideally, link to every other page. This makes the site very easy for your visitors to use, and gives the search engine spiders a road map. When possible, increase the value of your text links: Instead of “Contact Us”, use “Contact the Women’s Network”.
9. If your site is dynamic, make sure you still have a few static pages. Many search engines still can’t “crawl” dynamic pages, so they can’t give you ranking for them. Your index page and your basic informative pages should be in static text.
10. Avoid anything “tricky” like hidden text, pages of irrelevant links, or spamming your site in any way. These tricks are well known, and if you’re caught, you will be sentenced to search engine Siberia!
11. Duplicate content - try to make sure your content can only be accessed by one URL
12. Crawlability - try to make sure the site can be crawled OK by spiders (so avoid frames, crazy redirects or uncrawlable menus)
How to convert dynamic urls to search engine friendly. http://www.workingwith.me.uk/articles/scripting/mod_rewrite
Here is the official page: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html
13. Unhelpful URLs - try to avoid URL strings that are super long and are hard for people to decipher - a good rule of thumb is the question: "could a smart person understand what this URL does?" 14. Submit your site map to google ?
Create an account in:http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/
If you don't know how to make a sitemap use this site www.xml-sitemaps.com . Just add your url and run, run, xml-sitempas.com is free (500 pages), if you have more pages, you need to pay for it...
This way all the robots that see and know the sitemap will response to it and download your sitemap
Search Engine Optimization and Keyword optimization
Keyword Research Search engines still factor in the volume of keywords to determine rankings so you need to fill your page with as many keywords as possible, while still keeping standard language structure
1.1 Using the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool Use - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
1.2 Creating your keywords list You should find out what are the keywords that are present in already search engines and also which you often hear. The other way around which are the keywords that generally people can search and you want to serve them. After finding all these you need to create a keyword effectiveness index and then get a set of keywords which you are going to optimize and based on which your site should be known and searched.
To construct a keyword effectiveness index you simply need to plot a chart with search volume on the x-axis and either Google PR of the first site, or total results returned, or another measure of perceived keyword difficulty on the y-axis. The x-axis represents benefit and the y-axis represents inherent difficulty to achieve the top spot. You want to optimize for words with low difficult and high benefit. Otherwise known as the path of least resistance
1.3 Categorizing your keywords
After you get all your desired keywords, you need to categorize which keywords are general keywords and your site need to be highlighted as a provider of the products through this. The other set of keywords may be very specific keywords which you want people to find specific pages and not you site as these keywords are specific and hence people will go away if they do not get specific results.
So keep general popular keywords for your home page, category pages and more specific keywords for your product pages.
Ex – compliance training is good for home page and ISO 13485 training is good for lowest category page or product details page if you have only one product for it. also from category pages you can link to pages which has many products related to ISO 13485.
Hence create many keyword based pages which not necessarily a category page but can have few products related to that keyword.
1.4 Prioritizing your keywords Give more keywords and more repetitions of those keywords. Try to fit as many keywords as many times as possible without resorting to simple repetition. People will hopefully use more than one word or phrase to find your site so make sure you get some variety in there, just so long as it relates to your topic. Ex - Photography Resource. Photography, photography industry, facets of photography, photographer etc You do not always need to optimize your homepage. If you feel the main keywords are too competitive there is nothing wrong with focusing on subpage optimization and going after the long tail.
1.5 Assigning your keywords
- Besides your content there are other places you should put keywords. These include in your page headings, such as what you put between h tags. Search engines are trying more and more to read a site as a human would so that they can better rank pages. Many now treat text that is in h tags or otherwise emphasized with more importance than other text. So you should always put keywords in your headings. - Additionally sometimes people like to dress up their headings with images instead of text. You should refrain from doing this. Replacing text with an image may make it look prettier but it will do nothing but hurt your search engine rankings since search engines cannot read text from an image. - Other places to include your keywords are in alt and title attributes for image and link tags. You should use these as shown below.
<a href = "link.html" title = "Link Description With Keywords">Link Description With Keywords</a>
<img src = "image.jpg" alt = "image description with keywords">
- Your alt and title attributes shouldn't simply be a list of keywords, but rather a short description that uses keywords. Using these attributes will also make your website more accessible for people with disabilities, so put them everywhere.
- You should also never link to a page in your site with text like "Next" or "Click Here." Like using images to replace text all that this does is rob you of a spot to put keywords. Always use meaningful identifiers in your links and in everything else.
On page Search Engine Optimization
1. Homepage optimization
Find out a keyword which matches your business and search and see how popular it is. If it is popular, then check who is the competitor and if you can or can not compete with them. If both are no then better optimize for other pages.
Steps i. Name your site using your keywords. ii. Put your keywords in your title tag iii. The actual name of your site, the name appearing in your graphical header or logo, needs to include delimited keywords i.e Compliance Online spaces between the words so that someone making a link to your site does not think they're supposed to be clubbed together. iv. Place keywords in your body content, headers, and elsewhere v. Link back to your homepage from every page on your site, preferably using your keywords instead of just the word "home" ex- ComplianceOnline Home." This will help send PageRank to your homepage and keep with the good anchor text.
2. Category page optimization
i. Link to the category page using keywords as the anchor text ii. Put the keywords prominently in the title tag and in headings on the page itself. iii. Include a paragraph or two or keyword rich content.. iv. Linking to the categories on every page of your site also helps. v. The more links you can add to that category on your site the better off it is. Put a link to the category on your main menu, which is included on every page. vi. Add as many cross links between categories as you can. vii. Breadcrumb navigation is a good way to add a link back to your category page from your content or product pages. viii. Submit category pages to directories and or use them for link exchanges
3. Content/product page optimization
i. Link the most popular individual products on the left menu. Focus as much PageRank as possible on them by linking to them from every page of the site. ii. Do not use generic words like "Next Page" when sending people to the next page of a multi-page article or if you have many articles titles and want to send users to next page to see more categorize the articles and put the category name and add next to it i.e Rather than more webinars write More Pharma Webinars.
4. General activities to be done in on page Optimization
4.1 The Title Tag - Max 75 characters
The title tag isn't a meta tag but it is a meta-data.The title tag, like the meta tags, needs to go inside the HEAD tags of your HTML document. Title should contain the name of your website and a brief one sentence or write up of what you offer. <title>Compliance Training, best practices, content</title>
4.2 The Meta Description Tag - Max 150 characters Like the keyword tag it is also placed inside the tags of your HTML document, in fact they're usually placed side by side. The description tag should look as follows: <meta name = "description" content = "Information on photography supplies, lenses, film, and more. Search our….etc etc etc">
“Different title tags and meta description tags should be put on every page. Search engines index more than one page of the site, and many visitors will enter via a page deep in the site”
4.3 The Keywords Meta Tag The tag needs to be placed inside the tags of your HTML document and should look as follows: <meta name = "keywords" content = "keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, phrase of keywords1, etc"> Myth – people think that if we put more keywords we might get searched in search engines, but actually search engines are not influenced by keywords in keyword tag. Rather if keywords are present in content it will get searched. They search in order of title tag, description tag and then content of the page.
4.4 The Heading Tags
You need to put most relevant and complete page heading and place it in h1 tag. Ex - Add a page heading “Bank & Financial Regulatory Compliance Training & Best Practices” and place it in Heading1 (H1) tag There should not be more than 1 heading in a page with h1 tag.
Ex – <title>Compliance Training, Best Practices, Standards & News - ComplianceOnline</title> <meta name="description" content=" ComplianceOnline, provides online regulatory compliance training (700+ webinars), best practices, standards (ISO/ANSI) , QMS software and news. “> <meta name="keywords" content="Compliance Training, regulatory compliance training, Online compliance Training, e-learning, Regulatory standards, Rules, Best Practices, News, QMS software, ISO 9001, quality system standards, ComplianceOnline">
4.5 The Alt and Title Attributes
Include your keywords in alt and title attributes for image and link tags. You should use these as shown . <a href = "link.html" title = "Link Description With Keywords">Link Description With Keywords</a>
<img src = "image.jpg" alt = "image description with keywords">
alt and title attributes shouldn't simply be a list of keywords, but rather a short description that uses keywords. Using these attributes will make a website more accessible for people with disabilities, so put it everywhere.
4.6 The Optimized URL
Make sure the content can only be accessed by one URL.
Query string Most of the search engines index query strings. The following URL, http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLL_enIN332IN332&q=compliance+training , the bolded portion is a query string. But these urls are treated as dynamic and is either crawled slowly, and or only crawled if it has sufficient incoming links. The longer the URL the greater chance that it won't get crawled.
Session IDs
When search engine robots visit a site, the software appends a long string of numbers to the URL. This is a session ID. Session IDs are not only unfriendly, but they also tend to change rapidly for search engines, causing them to see the same content at multiple URLs. So the solution to this is to identify search engines by their HTTP_USER_AGENT and turn sessions IDs off for them. This is a good technique but we should verify it and test it.
Benefits of search engine friendly urls-
It helps you to hide the type of server side programming used by removing the extension (such as .php) from your URLs. Hence it gives freedom to change the backend software at a later date without changing your URLs, and it may even provide a security bonus.
Ways to pass info about the pages with out using query string Use meaningful identifiers for the pages. The ways will all work with Linux, Apache, & PHP. The list of methods covered is as follows:
Search Engine Friendly URLs with Path_Info
This method is the easiest way to do things and gives you URLs that look like this: http://www.domain.com/article.php/999/12. You see Apache has a "look back" feature that lets it scan back down the URL if it doesn't find what it is looking for. In this case there is no directory or file called 12, so it looks at 999. There is no directory or file called 999 so Apache looks down the URL and sees article.php, which does exist, and calls up that script. Apache also has a global variable called $PATH_INFO that is created on every HTTP request. What this variable contains is the script being called and everything to the right of that information in the URL. So in the example we have been using $PATH_INFO will contain article.php/999/12.
So, you wonder, how do I query my database using article.php/999/12? Well first you have to split it into variables you can use, we do that using PHP's explode function.
$var_array = explode("/",$PATH_INFO); Explode tokenizes a string (separates it) based on a delimiter. In this case we're using the delimiter "/" which will split the URL into three parts below accessed by the array $var_array;
$var_array[0] //article.php $var_array[1] //999 $var_array[2] //12 So you can rename $var_array[1] as $article and $var_array[2] as $page_num and query your database as if the URL had originally been article.php?article=999&page_num=12.
Troubleshooting If this method does not work for you it could mean that you are running Apache 2.X instead of Apache 1.X. Apache 2.X turns PATH_INFO off by default. To get around this you need add AcceptPathInfo On to your .htaccess file in your site's root HTML directory.
If this method still does not work it could be because PHP is being used via CGI instead of as an Apache module. There is a known bug with some versions of PHP that makes PATH_INFO not work when PHP is installed as CGI. To fix this you can either try upgrading (I believe this is fixed in newer versions) your php installation, or recompiling Apache with PHP as a module.
Drawback: There was previously one major drawback to using this method. Google, and perhaps other search engines, would not index pages set up in this manner as they thought they were seeing a malformed URL. I contacted a software developer at Google and made them aware of the problem and I am happy to announce that it is now fixed. That was in 2002 as I recall and I've heard no other reports of drawbacks since. Of course, obviously with this method you do not get the benefit of hiding the extension that I mentioned in this article's introduction. For that you need the next method, ForceType
Search Engine Friendly URLs with ForceType
The ForceType method works very similarly to the PATH_INFO method except it adds one additional layer of complexity because you are now hiding the extension of your script so that it looks like a directory.
Typically a web server knows how to handle requests by the extension any given file has. For instance, if a file has a .php extension Apache knows to parse it for PHP code before sending it to the browser. Apache's ForceType directive allows you to override any default mime types you have set up. Usually it may be used to parse an .html page as php or something similar, but in this case we will be using it to parse a file with no extension as php.
So instead of using article.php, as we did in method 1, rename that file to just "article" with no extension. You will be able to access it like this: http://www.domain.com/article/999/12/. Utilizing Apache's look back feature and $PATH_INFO variable as described in method 1. But as of right now Apache doesn't yet know to that "article" needs to be parsed as php. To achieve that you must add the following to your .htaccess file.
<Files article> ForceType application/x-httpd-php </Files> This is known as a container. Instead of applying directives to all files Apache allows you to limit them by filename, location, or directory. You need create a container as above and place the directives inside it. In this case we are using a file container, we identify "article" as the file we are concerned with and then we list the directives we want applied to this file before closing off the container.
With the directive inside the container we are telling Apache to parse "article" as a php script even though it has no file extension. This allows us to get rid of the period in the URL that causes the problems yet still use the PATH_INFO method to manage our site.
Troubleshooting The trouble shooting issues for this method are exactly the same as for method #1.
Drawback: There aren't really any drawbacks to doing this, this is one of the best methods of achieving friendly URLs, and in fact is probably my favorite method. It is also the method utilized on this site
Search Engine Friendly URLs with Custom 404 Pages
This method takes advantage of .htaccess' ability to do error handling. In your .htaccess file in whichever directory you wish to use this method simply put the following line:
ErrorDocument 404 /processor.php Now make a script called processor.php and put it in that same directory. That's all you have to do. Lets say you have the following URL: http://www.domain.com/999/12/. And again in this example 999 and 12 do not exist, however since you do not specify a script anywhere in the directory path Apache will create a 404 error. Instead of sending a generic 404 header back to the browser, Apache sees the ErrorDocument command in the .htaccess file and it will call up processor.php.
So now we're in processor.php. In the first example we used the $PATH_INFO variable, but that won't work this time. Instead we need to use the $REQUEST_URI variable. The $REQUEST_URI variable contains everything in the URL after the domain. So in this case: /999/12/.
The first thing you need to do in your processor.php is send a new HTTP header. Remember Apache thought this was a 404 error and so it wants to tell the browser that it couldn't find a page.
Put the following line first thing in your processor.php:
header("HTTP/1.1 200 OK"); At this time I need to point out an important fact. In the first example you could specify what script processed your URL. In this example all URLs must be processed by the same script, processor.php, which makes things a little different. Instead of creating different URLs depending on what you wanted to do, such as article.php/999/12 or printarticle.php/999/12 or category.php/13 you only have 1 script that must do both.
So your processor.php must decide what to do with the information it gets. Usually you can do this by counting how many parameters are passed. For instance on one of my sites, http://www.online-literature.com, I use this method to generate my pages. I know if there is just one parameter, such as http://www.online-literature.com/shakespeare/, that I need to load an author information page, if there are 2 parameters, such as http://www.online-literature.com/shakespeare/hamlet/, I know that I need to load a book information page, and finally if there are 3 parameters, such as http://www.online-literature.com/shakespeare/hamlet/3/, I know I need to load a chapter viewing page. Alternatively, you can just use the first parameter to indicate the type of page to display, and then process the remaining parameters based on that.
There are 2 ways you can accomplish this task of counting parameters. First, as in the PATH_INFO method, you need to use PHP's explode function to divide up the $REQUEST_URI variable. So if $REQUEST_URI = /shakespeare/hamlet/3/:
$var_array = explode("/",$REQUEST_URI);
Now note because of the positioning of the /'s there are actually 5 elements in this array. The first element, element 0, is blank because it contains the information before the first /. The fifth element, element 4, is also blank because it contains the information after the last /.
So now we need to count the elements in our $var_array. PHP has two functions that let us do this. We can use the sizeof() function as in this example:
$num = sizeof($var_array); // 5 You'll notice that the sizeof() function counts every item in the array regardless if it is empty. The other function is count(), which is an alias for the sizeof() function. This meants we cannot use this function...
You see, some search engines, like AOL, will automatically remove the trailing / from your URL, and this can cause a problem if you're using these functions to count your array. For instance http://www.online-literature.com/shakespeare/hamlet/ becomes http://www.online-literature.com/shakespeare/hamlet and since there are 3 total elements in the array our processor.php would load an author page instead of a book page. Additionally users will do it too by accident, and you do not want to leave them hanging. So you need to be able to accurately count the number of elements in the array.
The solution is to create a function that will count only the elements in an array that hold data. This will allow you to leave off the ending / or to allow any links that leave off the trailing slash still get to the right place.
An example of such a function is below.
function count_all($arg) {
// skip if argument is empty if ($arg) {
// not an array, return 1 (base case) if(!is_array($arg)) return 1;
// else call recursively for all elements $arg foreach($arg as $key => $val) $count += count_all($val);
return $count; } }Then to get your count you can access the function like this:
$num = count_all($url_array); Once you know how many parameters are needed you can define them like this:
$author=$var_array[1]; $book=$var_array[2]; $chapter=$var_array[3]; And then you can use includes to call up the appropriate script that will query your database and set up your page.
Also if you get a result you're not expecting you can simply create your own error page for display to the browser.
Drawback: The main drawback of this method is that you effective destroy any usefulness your error logs have as every page view will result in another line in the error log. However, this can be offset by the main benefit of this method which is that you can build it directly off your root. All the other methods require an intermediary script, like article or category, with this one you can start right off the root like I do on my literature site and I think that can provide a cleaner look (and certainly shorter URLs) depending on how you structure your content.
Search Engine Friendly URLs with mod_rewrite mod_rewrite is an Apache module that allows you to use regular expressions within an .htaccess file to rewrite your URLs. It is certainly the most powerful and most flexible of the methods, but there is a bit of a learning curve to using it.
Regular expressions are how computers do complex pattern matching. Explaining them in detail is beyond the scope of this article, but suffice it to say they can appear cryptic at first and that can be intimidating. Also, they teach you in programming never to use regular expressions when you do not need to. The reason is that regular expressions require more computer power than other functions and so you don't want to use them unless absolutely necessary.
Now, I've never done any benchmarks on these methods, and I do not know of anyone who has, however my gut tells me that mod_rewrite, because of it's reliance on regular expressions, is likely a little slower than the other methods. That's just something to keep in mind.
Most Apache installatinos use mod_rewrite, but your hosting company might not, so be sure to check first before you put work into this method.
So again, if you had a URL like http://www.example.com/article.php?article=999&page_num=12 and you wanted to turn it into http://www.example.com/article/999/12 you could do this with mod_rewrite.
To do this you'd simply put the following in your .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On RewriteRule ^article/(.*)/(.*)/ /article.php?article=$1&page_num=$2 The first line turns mod_rewrite on. The second line is your first rule (you can have as many as needed). Each rule takes two arguments separated by a space. The first argument contains the URL format you want to use, and the second argument contains the URL format your backend requires.
First lets examine the first argument, ^article/(.*)/(.*)/. The carat, ^, simply marks the beginning, then the important things within this argument are inside the parenthesis. With regular expressions parenthesis indicate tagged expressions, or matches you want to use later. They are given numbers based on order of appearance, so the first set of parenthesis becomes tagged expression 1, the second #2.
Within these tagged expressions is a . and a *. The period indicates that the expression matches any character, and the asterisk indicates that it can match any number of times. So basically there are no limits with the string you can put in there. In short, with regular expressions periods are wildcards for any character, and asterisks mean unlimited matches.
So, our first argument is saying to match URLs that contain article then a backslash, then any number of characters tagged as expression 1, then another backslash, then any number of characters tagged as expressions 2, then another backslash.
Our second argument, /article.php?article=$1&page_num=$2, is just like any other query string except you have access to the tagged expressions from argument #1 and you can feed these tagged expressions to your query string like normal variables as I marked in bold above. The first one is accessed as $1, the second one is accessed as $2. Its that easy.
The beauty of this method is that you have to do no special coding within your files themselves, it is all done within .htaccess. You just code your internal site links to use the URL format you want, then you write the rewrite code to take that format and turn it into a normal query string.
Drawback: The main drawback of this method, and some will dispute that it is even a drawback, has already been mentioned above. Also, while mod_rewrite can be made to do practically anything, the fact is that the code required to do more complicated rewriting is much more complicated and novices will likely be confused and intimidated by it.
All 4 methods potentially make use of Apache's .htaccess file. Other methods to convert dynamic urls to search engine friendly.
Here is a guide: http://www.workingwith.me.uk/articles/scripting/mod_rewrite Here is the official page: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html
4.7 PageRank Distribution The more outgoing links are there in your site the less page rank you will get. i.e with each outgoing link you are giving a part of your page rank to other site. So get as many as inbound links possible. Also get a page where all the outbound links are placed.
4.8 Optimized Internal Site Link Structure Search engines make no distinction between internal links ( link between different pages of your site) and links from other outside pages. if you link to a page that links to you then it is called reciprocal link and search engines do not punish but devalue these links. So the link exchanges are good, they should be entered into with some trepidation
4.8.1Menu
- To keep the menu search engine friendly, use normal HTML anchor tags to make the links. Avoid DHTML and FLASH.
- However, if your DHTML menu simply moves normal HTML anchor tags around then you're fine since a search engine can still parse that link out of your source code.
- If you absolutely must use a menu that search engines cannot read you should include duplicate plain text menu somewhere on your page, or in noscript tags.
- In addition to using normal HTML anchor tags you should put text, not images, in those tags. The reason is that the anchor text used to link to pages is a vital part of the ranking algorithm of many search engines, notably Google
- Most menus also include a link to your home page with words like "Home" or "Index." If you're trying to optimize your index page this is a bad idea, you'll be much better off linking to your home page using text like "Keyword Home," the benefit from this one small change can be substantial.
4.8.2 Minimizing Supplemental Pages
Supplemental pages are those pages which comes up in search where google or other search engines dose not have much search results and google shows these pages. Also these are pages which cannot confer PageRank and anchor text.
So it is best to minimize supplemental pages so that the main index page shows up. We can do it by avoiding following things - - Duplicate content. If Google already sees the content on one page, why should it include another page with the same content in the Main Index. While this seems logical, there are many Wikipedia scraper sites whose pages are in the Main Index. Simply having duplicate content does not appear to be sufficient reason for a page to go into the Supplemental Index.
Solution – it is a myth that google penalize if there are duplicate content. No search engine will penalize, but if you have duplicate content then the page rank i.e popularity for that content is distributed between the 2 pages and none of the pages comes up.
- Canonical issues. If you link to your page with the "www" prefix, without the "www" prefix, with the page name (ala "index.html") and without the page name (ala "http://www.example.com/"), you have created a canonical issue. To a search engine, those look like four different pages, when in fact they are one. However, many pages end up in the Main Index with multiple URLs.
Solution - Canonical URLS for duplicate contents: <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.complianceonline.com/ecommerce/control/compliance-training” /> Simply place this link tag in the head section of the duplicate content urls : http://www.complianceonline.com/ecommerce/control/trainingHome
- Insufficient links to the domain. I have found many deep, secondary pages listed in the Main Index while the majority of their pages (including the root URL) are in the Supplemental Index.
- Distance from root URL. The idea is that the more directories deep on your site a page is, the more likely it is to show in the Supplemental Index. Many SEOs are skeptical because we have all seen deep content rank highly in search results. A rule-of-thumb that has been gaining in popularity is the more clicks it takes to reach a page from the root URL, the more likely it is to show as Supplemental (and the less likely it is to be indexed at all). However, deep content can have more external linkage than internal linkage. On Xenite.Org, the pages that show as Supplemental tend to have no more than 1 link pointing to them regardless of where they fall in our directory hierarchy. They are usually no more than 3 or 4 links from the root URL.
- Solution - How Do You Move Pages Into The Main Index?
Try getting links from pages that are already in the Main Index. You should not need many.
Try to get links from pages that don't sell links, not because paid links are bad but because a page that doesn't sell links is more likely to pass value than a page that does sell links. You have no way of knowing which pages pass value.
If you have a large content site, you need to have multiple secondary indexes -- one for each sub-section of the site, at least -- as well as extensive cross-linking between your pages. You cannot have 1 page link to 1,000 others. Ex - On many of Xenite's pages they actually provide extensive link sections to help people find related content on Xenite.Org.
4.8.3 Link popularity
The quality of link determines the link popularity. i.e the ranking and hence to get a higher rank for a keyword you should link to the site having the same or similar keywords. The keywords in the link and around the link i.e the header etc in the linked page also determines the page rank. Use ComplianceOnline Home instead of simple Home
Post your sitemap in google webmaster central http://www.google.com/webmasters/ it also has tools to fine which keywords searched your site, what are the errors Google faced while searching the site
Link popularity w.r.t. redirects -> - Avoid long and complicated redirect URLs. - High link popularity is directly related to the links pointing to this same URL, not any variation or mirror of it - To maintain search engine rankings try using a "301 Redirect." This type of redirect sends a special HTTP header to the client that should tell the search engines to apply the weight to the resulting page. - This is important to remember even if you do not use redirects as www.example.com, example.com, www.example.com/index.html, and example.com/index.html are all the same page, and yet are 4 different URLs. So be sure you link to your internal pages the same way throughout your entire site
Writing Optimized Web Content
5.0.1 Headings
5.0.2 Paragraphs
Competitive Link Popularity Analysis
6.0.1 Analyzing link strategy of competitor websites 6.0.2 Getting links from sites that link to competitor sites 6.0.3 Getting link from amateur sites
Find out what are the sites which are run by individuals like blogs and sites having fewer pages and which is not used for making money. As these sites are there for long period of time they have many inbound links and also self written content and hence more relevant for your site.
Note - if there isn't an email address available on the site for comments, suggestions, proposals, or anything of that nature then you shouldn't just blindly email them. Some people really hate solicitations and it is better to be safe than sorry.
6.0.4 Specialized directories. Though they are not as popular as big directories like DMOZ or Yahoo, smaller specialized directories can be a viable source of traffic and link popularity, so be sure to submit to every one you find.
Advanced Link Building Techniques - Another way to find smaller places to submit is to search on Google for the words "Add URL" or "Submit URL" (or any other variation of related text such as "Submit site") and your keywords. This will find a slew of places for you to submit your site to.
- If you post in forums or newsgroups this can be another way to get link popularity. Always include a signature with a link to your URL and if a spider visits the forum, and I should note not all forums welcome spiders, every single post can help your link popularity
- Another way to get incoming links is by writing articles. Most sites provide their author's with a signature for their articles where they're allowed to link to or promote their sites. The site for instance welcomes article submissions.
- It should be a daily habit to check your referrer logs. I'll admit that when your site becomes popular and you are getting visitors from thousands of referrers each day that it gets kind of boring, but it is very important. Every time you come across a new site linking to you, submit it to the search engines.
- You can also compare what Google and a different engine such as AltaVista show for your backwards links, and cross submit the ones that are missing
7.0.1 Link baiting 7.0.2 Viral link building
Retaining your link popularity - Include a large amount of internal links on every page. Outnumber external links with internal ones. - Group all of your outbound links in a single link page, which is a very popular practice. However be sure you don't put a link to the link page on every page of your site, as many do. Instead provide a link to your link page in one location, such as the bottom of your home page - Another thing you can do is make your links in javascript or with forms. Since spiders do not read javascript or forms by making such links you should effectively stop the flow of page rank away from your site - Another issue is that you may have pages on your site that search engines don't need to see, yet that you must link to. The solution in this case is to block those pages from being indexed with a robots.txt file or with the robots meta tag “A new method of telling search engines not to follow links is called "nofollow" or "rel=nofollow" simply add it to the middle of your link code, such as in <a href = "http://www.example.com" rel = "nofollow">Example</a>l; and search engines will not count the link.”
Don’ts Replacing text with an image may make it look prettier but it will do nothing but hurt your search engine rankings since search engines cannot read text from an image
Tools for SEO http://www.cuttingedgewebsitesolutions.com/seo-tools/
9.1 Link Building 9.1.1 Directory Submissions 9.1.2 Forum Postings 9.1.3 Blog comments 9.1.4 Article Writing and Submission 9.1.5 Press Release Writing and Distribution 9.1.6 Reciprocal Link Program 9.1.7 Paid Directory Submissions 9.1.8 Submission to Bookmarking Site
This Article will give small things which you can do to have your website well placed to be crawled and indexed by major search engines and also indexed by small website so as to have a dual benefit and ultimately increase relevant converting traffic.