SEO TIPS
SEO - Search Engine Optimizaton
To optimize your web-pages for search engines is an investment in your bottom line. The internet is a powerful marketing tool for small businesses. The great Equalizer and advancer!
The following tips will help your site to be found, indexed and ranked with the major search engines.
The Best time to think about implementing SEO practices is BEFORE you edit the content into your website!
SEO tips for Content and Layout
- Ensure your sites navigation is clear and easy. Every page should be accessible from a link somewhere on your site. Avoid hidden links, or mystery links. A static visible link works best. Your "My Easy Edit Website" pages have Navigation Menu directed links readable by the search engines.
- Provide a site map pointing to the various pages of your web-site. Try to keep the links to 100 or less per page. More may be divided up into separate pages. Your "My Easy Edit Website" provides a site map for the search engines meeting this requirement.
- Best single thing you can do for SEO is to have a content rich site which is informative, accurate and well written.
- Consider a searchers choice of search terms. Use words in your site which a searcher might use. These are known as KeyWords. Use these keywords throughout your site.
- Use readily availble tools to help you identify the best Keywords. Some of these tools are listed below:
- https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=64886
- https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
- https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=64886
- http://adlab.microsoft.com/Keyword-Forecast/
- http://www.vretoolbar.com/keywords/
- Insiston uses these tools for developing SEO into Client Sites!
- Use text instead of images displaying text for all your important content and headings. It might look great for example to have a heading over a graphical image, so combining the two to achieve the effect to use as an article header. However search engines are lousy at picking text out of an image. So better to use plain text. But if your going to use the image with text, at least use the "Alt Text" to capture the Heading information as search engines will read this.
Alt Text in "My Easy Edit Website" is available for all images placed in your site. If using the "image block" there is an "Alt Text/Caption" field to input this information into. See Below.
- To add "Alt Text" to your images when working with your "content blocks" wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) editor in "My Easy Edit Website" do the following:
- Insert image by clicking the "Add Image" link at the top of the editor
- Select your image from the File Manger
- Now with your image in the editor, click the image.
- Now select the "Insert/edit image" icon
on the tool bar
- From the popup window enter your "Alt Text" into the Image Description field.
- Also define the text alignment while your there. Middle places the text in the middle of the picture as demonstrated here.
- Your descriptive "Alt Text" has now been defined.
- Ensure that titles, captions and alt text's are descriptive and accurate
- If you use links on your pages, internal or external links, make sure they work properly. If a Menu or Navigational link does NOT work properly, contact Insiston immediately to correct it. Its part of your support.
Images are searchable on the internet just the same as web-pages. Ensure you define your images in such a way as to be found via your images as well as your texual content.
- Name your images descriptively. Instead of using your camera's assigned image sequence number such as dca1021 (kodak picture sequence number 1021 for example), instead use a descriptive name. For example "cat_playing_ball" or "cat-playing-ball".
- When someone searches for a cat playing with a ball, your image is likely to be upfront in the search results. This could in turn lead searchers to your site. Better SEO.
- In the Content section we briefly covered the use of Alt Text with images. One additional point is to avoid trying to trick search engines by doing what is known as stuffing.
- Stuffing is when you try to embed tons of keywords in under the radar like through "Alt Text" code. The example of our cat above might be to include extra keywords in the alt text such as: "White Cat, furry cat, cat with collar, cat with red collar playing with ball, cat with shadow playing with ball, cat outside playing with ball"
- This might seem like a good trick but its an old one, and one the search engines penalize for...so best practices suggest keeping to the straight and narrow and not doing such things.
- To rename your images in your computer:
- Right click on your image from your computer file
- From the drop down box select "Rename"
- Type over the blue highlighted words the new name.
- Now your images have a new descriptive name.
- Search engines also get the sense of an image's worth by means of the text on the page around the image. So images need to match context. A picture of a rattlesnake in a ice cream article would be as confusing to a search engine as it would to you or me. And you don't want a confused search engine rating your site.
- Images should also be of high quality. Not blurred, out of focus or of otherwise poor qualty.
- One fear of many webmasters is that their images will be stolen by other sites. So they go overboard right click protecting, watermarking, etc. But consider another option.
- If your images are highly sought by others...use that to drive traffic. If you license your images under a creative commons license with the condition of having to apply attribution, you might be better off.
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to quote from the creative commons website "With a Creative Commons license, you keep your copyright but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit — and only on the conditions you specify"
- They give you the tools to provide the license and means of receiving the credit and link back to your site. Check them out Creative Commons License
These are the basics of good SEO practices. #1 being good Content followed by good use of keywording in Titles, Headings and used appropriately in the context as they would be used normally if a search engine was not looking over your site.
For more on SEO, we recommend the following links
Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide
55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love
Free Websubmission to 50+ search engines
SEO Videos