Conclusion
Creating, editing, and promoting unique high-quality content is difficult and time consuming. But in the end, the golden rule of SEO is that Content is the King. It is not because of a search engine, but it is for your site visitors. A page that is read by people is better than a page that is read by bots.
So, write your content after a serious thought. Keep your title, keywords, link text, metatags up-to-date, unique, and interesting.
SEO - Verifying Web Site
You design and develop a website but how would you know if you have put all the HTML syntax in a correct way. Most browsers do not complain against your wrong syntax, but wrong is wrong.
There are many SEO experts who claim that SEO is not dependent on site HTML/XHTML verification. But we will discuss various reasons why your site should be W3C Compliance.
Why HTML/XHTML Verification is Required?
There are various reasons to verify your website before hosting it over the internet.
- Any webpage quality depends on how well you have written your webpage.It should be syntactically correct and should pass all the Quality Gates.
- When any search engine does indexing for your web page content, it might get confused if the HTML tags are not written properly, and much of the web page content might not be indexed properly.
- There might be many HTML tags, which you are using in your webpage but then have been depreciated and many of the search engines do not support them.
- Consistency, HTML Code Beauty, Process Compliance are always appreciated by good webmasters.
What is W3C Compliance?
W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium and since 1994, the W3C has provided the guidelines by which, websites and webpages should be structured and created. Here are the links to validate your web pages:
- Validate HTML/XHTML File against W3C Standard HTML/XHTML Validator.
- Validate CSS File against W3C Standard CSS Validator.
While verification, you may get errors along with appropriate reasons. All the validations will be done using XHTML DTD, which is a refined version of HTML.
Rules for W3C Compliance
There following rules, are to be following while developing a webpage.
- Use XHTML declaration statements to start every XHTML page:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> - Every tag must be closed.
- The head and body tags are now mandatory.
- Empty tags get a terminating slash. An empty tag is a tag that doesn't require an end tag. Examples include <br> and <hr>.
<BR> is now <br />. <HR> is now <hr />. <IMG SRC="--"> is now <img src="--" />
- All tags must be lower-case. This does not apply to attributes, only tags. For example, both of these formats are acceptable under the XHTML DTD:
<FONT color="#ffffcc"> is invalid <font color="#ffffcc"> is valid <font color="#FFFFCC"> is also valid
- All the attribute values should be put with in double quotes.
- Tags may not be nested.
<b><i>Text</b></i> This is invalid <b><i>Text</i></b> This is valid
- The <pre> tag should not contain: img, object, big, small, sub, or sup.
- One <form> tag cannot be inside another <form> tag.
- If your code contains a &, it must be written as &.
- Any use of CSS should use all lower-case letter.
SEO - Hiring an Expert
Creating, editing, and promoting unique high-quality content is difficult and time consuming. If you are really serious about SEO and you are not getting expected result, then it would be better to hire an SEO expert.
SEO experts perform the are following tasks:
- Code validation and clean up - Ensure that the code is search engine friendly and standards compliant.
- Site Structure - Building a semantic structure/theme and ensure URLs are spider friendly.
- On-Page optimization - Page Title, copy writing, Call-to-action, etc.
- Quality link building - Securing one way links from relevant sites.
- Keyword research - Building a list of key phrases relevant to your business.
- Creating Quality Content - Building optimized pages around terms discovered through keyword research.
- Off-Page Optimization - Managing Blogs, Press Releases, Article Submissions.
If you are confident that you have the required skills, then you can take care of all the above activities; otherwise it is worth taking help from SEO Companies or to hire any SEO specialist.
Choosing an SEO Expert or Company
It is very difficult to choose a correct SEO expert or SEO company. However the following guidelines can help you in this activity:
- Start searching through your friends and business partners.
- Post your queries in SEO Forums to get feedback from the community.
- Check other sites rank which they already have optimized.
- Do not go for SEO companies doing automated submission.
- Do not go for SEO companies doing Black Hat tricks.
- Do not look for cheap SEO. But take care, high price also does not guarantee high quality.
- Take guarantee if possible for a particular rank and any particular search engine.
- User SEO Expert or Company name in Google to find more information about them.
- Do not go just because of their fancy site and availability of good articles on their site.
- Do not get fascinated by the testimonials available on their sites.
We can not list out all the factors here because there may be different situations and different views. You should be smart enough to think what's bad and what's good.
SEO - Link Building
Link building is the SEO practice of obtaining links from external websites to your own to improve both direct referrals (i.e., people clicking on the links), and search engine ranking. Link building is all about increasing your site link popularity.
Website Crawler goes to a site again and again whose ranking in a search engine is high. You can verify this fact by putting your site on a high-rank site. If your site link is available on a high-rank website, then you have 99.99% chances that your site is indexed within 24Hrs.
How to Increase Link Popularity?
There are various ways of increasing your website link popularity. You can follow the tips given below, which are easily doable.
- Submit your site in popular search engines manually. Do not go for automated submission.
- Get your site listed in Open Directory Projects like dmog.org, yahoo.com. Getting listed in these directories gives a boost in link popularity and improve search engine ranking in other search engines.
- Provide high quality content so that anyone would naturally link to your site if you are featuring what they want, and that is not available anywhere else.
- Leverage your personal relations with other webmasters. Put your site link on their sites. One-way links often count for more than reciprocal links.
- Participate in Link Exchange Programs. Find top 20 sites doing the same business and contact them for reciprocal links. Link exchange between unrelated sites might affect the ranking of websites in the search engine.
- If you are subscribed in a forum and the forum does not have any restriction to keep your site link as your signature, then it can help you to increase your site popularity.
- Submit your site to bookmark sites like DIGG and Slashdot. Before submitting, please go through their spam policy.
- Write good articles in blogging sites and give a few references of your links within that article.
- Keep providing good content to your site visitors. Try to keep them busy on your site. If possible create forums, newsletters, blogs, etc.
There are other ways, but you need to spend some dollars to go for such alternatives.
- Buy a place on high-rank website where you can put your link.
- Subscribe for Google's AdWords program to drive traffic towards your site.
- You can go for alternative advertising option to increase the number of hits on your site, which can result in your site link popularity.
SEO - Mobile
Millions of users these days access the web using smartphones running on Android, iOS, or Windows. Hence, it has become imperative that websites adapt themselves to this changing environment and make suitable changes in their website design to attract more viewership.
The desktop version of a site might be difficult to view and use on a mobile device. The version that is not mobile-friendly requires the user to pinch or zoom in order to read the content. Users find this a frustrating experience and are likely to abandon the site. In contrast, a mobile-friendly version is readable and immediately usable.
A recent Google update makes it mandatory that a website should be mobile-friendly to be effective on Mobile Search Engines. Note that a website that is not mobile-friendly will not have any impact on regular search engines either.
In this chapter, we will see how to make a website mobile-friendly in order to ensure the visitors who access the website from mobile devices have an optimized experience.
What is Mobile SEO?
Mobile Search Engine Optimization is the process of designing a website to make it suitable for viewing on mobile devices of different screen sizes having low bandwidth. Apart from following all the SEO rules which are applicable to a desktop website, we need to take additional care while designing a website for mobile devices. A website is mobile friendly if it has the following attributes −
- A good mobile website has a responsive design which performs well on desktops as well as mobile devices. It not only reduces the maintenance of the website but also makes the content consistent for the search engines.
- The contents of a good mobile website are easy to read on a mobile device without having to zoom the screen. It has appropriate fonts, colors, and layouts.
- It is easy to navigate through a good mobile website on a small screen. It provides links and buttons that can be easily maneuvered using a finger.
- A good mobile website is lightweight such that it takes less bandwidth and time to load on mobile networks.
- The Home Page of a mobile website plays the most important role in connecting users to the content they are looking for. Therefore, good mobile websites make sure the most important links are displayed on the Home Page so that they get enough visibility.
The ranking of a website depends heavily on how user friendly it is. You can follow the guidelines given below to design a great mobile-friendly website.
