Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
One of the odd things I have noticed recently, is how little companies that offer website design don’t optimize the websites they build for their clients. For example, when I was looking at a portfolio of this website design company, I saw this real-estate company’s site. Curious, I took a peek. Here are a few breakdowns of my evaluation of that website’s page.
Positives of the Website:
- Pages were developed with a server-side language
- The content was organized
- It had conversion forms, such as a simple contact form
Negatives of the Website:
- Page names were using variable names that were not Search Engine Friendly in the URL
- The content was somewhat static, and needed Javascript to view most of it around the images about houses
- The URL had (2) different domain names
- The Title was not filled with keywords that made sense
- The Description was longer than 150 characters
- Too many keywords in the Meta tag
In my experience, Search Engines like to view your site based on a good user experience. Too many web designers are still developing websites based on tactics that were “the in thing” in the late 90’s - early 2000’s. You can’t do that.
Since Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and other SE’s tend to be moving more to an organic and user-like way of crawling a site - you need to give them that. I will write more on this in separate pieces in the future, but I just thought I would cover some basic on-site SEO factors.
Glad to see you are a follower of the DoFollow movement.
Letting links in your comment be followed by search engine, ie.e removing the nofollow tags added by blog software ( presumably to deter spam) is a great way to encourage visitors to comment on your web site.
Thank you Lisa. I am a believer of rewarding your visitors. If someone takes the time to read my thoughts, and offer good criticism for it then they deserve to get something back.
Google created the NoFollow reference as a way to discourage spam, but there are now many ways to help prevent this. So, I think the NoFollow tag is something that should be used less, and better ways of spam prevention used instead.
Have you ever tried link building as an search engine optimization tool? If you have not you should because it is one great way of building traffic through link love. You do not have to pay companies do so. You can simply leave comments on others sites with a link to redirect to your site.