Here is a list of techniques that can be used to obtain good search results.
SEM Code Breakdown:
Title Tags
- Put the Search Term 1st and then product name.
- Keep the number of characters between 60 and 80.
- When creating a title tag make sure it is both unique and concise.
- Title tag needs to be readable to your website’s visitors.
URL
- URLs of a website should be static with no extraneous characters.
- 2. URLs naming scheme should contain keywords as long as they are relevant to the content.
- Remove extraneous characters from your URL (%&$?…)
Meta Description Tag
- Keywords – the keywords in the meta description tag should represent the content of the page.
- Length – the meta description should be short and to the point. Try not to make the meta description tag longer then 120 characters
- Do not use the same meta description tag throughout your site, each page should have a different tag. Many times it is best to just place the first one or two sentences from the content into the meta description tag.
- Sentences – make the description a complete sentence so it is easy to read and understand.
- If possible, use only a couple of keywords in your meta description and try to place them towards the beginning.
Headings
- Use H1, H2, and H3 tags for topics
- Keywords in the heading tags should represent the content of the page.
- Have a structure of what, how, features, and so on
- Use H1-H3 tags over H4 or lower tags.
- If you place a keyword in your heading tag, make sure that keyword is also in the content or at least related to the content of the page.
- Make headings short and to the point.
Content
- Keywords – there should already be keywords within the content if content is written for your visitors. There should also be variations in the keywords (apple, apples) as well as additional related keywords (apple, fruit) within the content.
- The earlier placement of keywords in the content the more likely that the content is related to these keywords.
- The content should be written for visitors.
- Links within the content should be related to the content.
- Fresh content that is updated more frequently may be more useful to searchers.
- Unique and original content will rank higher then duplicate content.
- Sites are better to have a few pages with quality..
- The content on a website should be based on similar topics or “themes”.
- The keyword density should be similar on context to other related websites.
Alt Tags
- Place alt tags on all images.
- Alt description should be relevant to the image.
- Alt tags should be short.
Internal Links
- Keywords – links that contain keywords should be related to the webpage they point to.
- Link should represent the linked page.
Indexing
- All the pages of that website should have the ability to be indexed.
- A sitemap should be created for all sites.
External Links
- If the main website links to another website, then that website will be considered relevant and valuable to end user.
- The longer a link has been on a website, the more valuable the link is.
- The more outbound links on a page, the less weight each link will have.
- Sites with important extensions such as .edu and .gov are considered to link to more valuable sites.
- If a site has outbound links and updates frequently, then even the old outbound links are considered to be valuable.
- Incoming links are considered very important to a site.
- Linking websites – links from related websites are better then links from non-related websites.
- DMOZ – websites that are in DMOZ and link out to other websites are considered to link to good sites.
Code
- The code should be efficient and not take up load time.
- Clean code usually loads up faster for users and helps the search engines index better.
- Use CSS and develop design strictly in external code file.
Website
The following are some factors that Google may look at in a negative way:
- Over optimization of keywords may not be relevant for any search terms.
- Websites with too many keywords stuffed into the content might be considered spam.
- Reciprocal links between each other too many times might be trying to cheat.
- Cloaking – websites that show Google a different page then what the viewer sees usually get banned.
- Anchor text – if all the websites linking to a website have the same anchor text, those links will not be considered natural.
- Websites that have tons of other websites redirecting into them might be trying to increase their link count to rank high, so Google may penalize these websites.
