The following guide provides information how you can optimize your web pages for a better position on Google and other search engines. While the guide is intended for everyones use it assumes that you have FTP experience and access to the web files.
Title tags
What is it?
The title tag is an HTML object that defines text as the title of your document. The title is displayed in your browser window and can be shown in your page tabs.
Why is it important?
The title tag is by far the most important element on your web page. Search engines place a lot of emphasis on the words contained in the title tag. Not only does it contribute to a high ranking but all search engines display the title for the page in search-engine results. It's important to remember that your title tag will be the first item your potential customers will see, even before they visit your web site. A well written title tag should begin with you targeted search phrase then include important information about your business. Typically a title tag should follow this format:
Target Search Phrase - Business Name - City, State
<Insert Image of Page Title in Browser / Page Title in Search Results>
How Do I Change My Title Tag?
The title tag will appear between the <head> </head> tags of your document. You will need to open the file in any web editing program and access the HTML code. Look for the text in between the <title> </title> objects. Replace the text with the new optimized title tags.
It's important to have unique title tags for every page in your website, so once you have updated the home page title follow the same steps for the interior pages of your website.
Congratulations You Have Now Optimized Your Title Tags!
Meta Description
What is it?
Meta tags allow the website editor to embed information about the document. The meta description tag provides an abstract or brief summary of the page content.
Why is it important?
While the meta descriptions will not have a direct impact on your search engine rankings, it is strongly advised to have unique descriptions for each page on your website. Meta descriptions may occasionally be used as the snippet of text below your page title in the search results. This gives you another opportunity to provide valuable information about your website before anyone even visits your site. Meta descriptions should typically be written in a standard sentence format and not exceed 160 characters.
How Do I Change Meta Description?
Like the title tag the meta description in located between the <head> </head> tags of the document. It will look like the following tag:
<meta name="description" content="The area between the quotes in the content section contains the information used for the meta tag. You should edit this information with your newly revised meta description" />
If you do not see a meta description tag you can add this tag anywhere between the <head> </head> tags. Typically the description is placed on the line below the <title> tag.
On Page Optimization
What is it?
This section covers other items that you should keep in mind when editing the web page.
Why is important?
Don't lose focus of the purpose of your web site. Too often so much emphasis is placed on search engines that the focus of the web site can be over looked. While achieving a high ranking on search engines is important don't forget about your customers.
How do I focus on my customers?
Your website provides the first impression to the customers. These few pointers will help make your website more presentable.
Summarize your unique selling points in 3 - 4 quick digestible bullet points.
If you feel the point needs more emphasis you can include supporting information below the bullets points or further down the page. It's important to make your key points stand out so visitors that skim your content are able to absorb the information.
Use relevant imagery
Search engines have a difficult time interpreting images, but your customers appreciate pictures.
Place all you key information about the fold.
Above the fold means the area of your web page that is viewable prior to having to scroll down. It is important to put your most important information where it can be quickly accessible with our require visitor interaction.
End every page with a call to action
When a visitor reaches the bottom of you web page is there a clear call to action leading them to the next step? If you want visitors to call, email, or buy be sure to tell them and provide a logical step for them to follow.
301 Redirect / Canonical URLs
What is it?
A 301 redirect is a server code that means the file has been permanently moved to a new location.
Why is it important?
Websites often allow multiple paths to the same content which can confuse search engines. The following addresses show a common example of multiple URL's that display the same content.
http://mywebsite.com
http://www.mywebsite.com/index.php
http://mywebsite.com/index.php
These URL's are all functioning and will show the same file - index.php. Unfortunately search engines will view each URL as a separate page of the website. A search engine will pick only one of these pages to show in their results since each of these pages contains the same information. The potential downfall is that the versions that are filtered may contain valuable inbound links that are no longer counted since the duplicate version is filtered.
The solution is to properly canonicalize the websites URL's. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices and it can be accomplished two ways.
First you can set up permanent redirects that explain to a search engine which version is the best to store.
http://mywebsite.com has been permanently moved to http://www.mywebsite.com
http://mywebsite.com/index.php has been permanently moved to http://www.mywebsite.com
Secondly you can incorporate a canonical meta tag that provides a strong hint to search engines which URL is the preferred version.
How do I do it?
First of all you will need to determine if your website is stored on a Linux or Windows hosting platform. Most website use Linux so this is the method we will cover first. Warning: Errors in your .htaccess file can bring down your website so be sure to test once completed
Create an .htaccess file
Typically the best way to create an .htaccess file is to open notepad or any other ASCII editor. Open notepad by selecting run from the Start Menu and entering notepad in the dialog box.
Paste the following code into the notepad window.
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
#
# Redirect to remove "<any_directory>/index.php" from search results
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)*index\.php
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index\.php$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
#
# Redirect to force canonical non-www domain name
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Replace example with your website address and edit index.php to your home page if needed.
Save the file as .htaccess
FTP to file to your web server's root directory
Test the website to make sure the redirects are functioning normally.
The next method of canonicalization with work on both Windows and Linux servers since you will be editing the file.
Open the home page file in any editor.
In between the <head> </head> tags add the following code:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/" />
Congratulations you have now successfully set up canonical URLs on your web page.
XML Sitemap
What is it?
An XML Sitemap is a file that lists all the URLs of your website. It also can contain additional information about these URLs to help search engines understand how to prioritize pages within your web site.
Why is it important?
Crawling web pages is a very resource intensive task. Providing a sitemap dramatically reduces the resources required to crawl your site. Not only are you helping Google use less resources when examining your content, you also get to prioritize which pages are important to you.
How do I do it?
Creating a XML sitemap could be a difficult task if there weren't a number of free sitemap generators. I recommend using http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ since they provide a free generator up to 500 URLs. If your website has over 500 URLs their generator is only a one time fee of $19.95 providing additional features of checking your website for broken links and automatically updating as you add new content to the website.
Once the tool has completed select -
Download un-compressed XML Sitemap
This will save a file called sitemap.xml to your local system. After saving it to your computer you can now upload this file to your web site directory.
Google and other search engines will automatically look for this file but you can also register an account with their webmaster tools and specify where your sitemap is stored. You will need to sign up for an account and upload a verification file in order to use their tools but their information is usually worth it.
http://google.com/webmaster
http://www.bing.com/webmaster
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
Congratulations you have now successfully set up a XML site on your web site.
Set Up a Robots.txt
What is a robots.txt?
A robots.txt file is a standard text file that tells search robots which pages you would like them not to visit.
Why is it important?
Search engines automatically look for this file when visiting your website. If you have sections of your website that you do not want crawled this is the way to prevent access. Even if you don't have prohibited sections its useful to tell search engines nothing is off limits.
How do I do it?
The simplest robots.txt file will tell search engine robots they can review all the files. This is easily created by opening notepad and adding the following two lines of text.
User-Agent: *
Allow: /
Save the file as robots.txt and upload to your web directory. If there are sections that you want to prevent you can note this by adding lines - Disallow: /directory/ Google webmaster tools provides robots.txt generator inside Webmaster Tools under Site Configuration > Crawler Access
Congratulations you have now successfully set up a robots.txt file for your web site!