When I first got into web design, as far as I was concerned, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was the inclusion of the META KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION tags within a webpage. With just that, I was experiencing poor results when viewing my Google Analytics. I jumped into SEO research to discover why this was so. SEO is not as simple as it seems. The purpose of this post is to bring some simple yet effective measures to be taken to improve a websites visibility on the internet.
This post addresses some of the core aspects of SEO such as:
- robots.txt
- sitemap.xml
- dublin.rdf
- Social Networking
- Blogging
- Online Directories
- Google Adwords
robots.txt
An extremely useful little text file. Should you sign up to Google Webmaster (which is most definitely recommended), it asks you to please submit a robots.txt file. The purpose of this file is to tell the search engine spiders (what run through the internet collecting information about your website) which pages you would like the spider to cache and which to not. For instance, a websites administration CMS (Content Management System) should not appear in Google search results. For more information, visit Wikipedia.
sitemap.xml
You should notice in the above example of the robots.txt file a link to a “sitemap”. This xml document specifes all the web pages which are part of your website. It helps search engine spiders discover which pages your website has and where they can be found. This helps ensure that no part of your website is missed by the spider. For more information, visit Wikipedia.
dublin.rdf
This file is very similar to the sitemap.xml file mentioned above. A Resource Description Framework (RDF) file is a family of the W3C specification and its purpose is to assist the crawling of your website by search engine spiders. For more information, visit Wikipedia.
.htaccess
The .htaccess file allows a website owner to customize their website assisting search engines in caching the data as well as user experience of the website. File compression can be enabled using .htaccess to allow faster loading of web pages. For more information, visit Wikipedia.
The above mentioned files should all be placed in the root directory of your website folder. The robots.txt and sitemap.xml files can be linked to Google though Google Webmaster. The following information aims at improving a websites visibility by featuring itself in more places across the web.
Social Networking
Social Networking has changed the way we communicate with others across the world. Websites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and a host of others dominate the social networking sector of the internet. Making use of the large user base of these websites can greatly improve ones visibility on the internet. Facebook allows users to create specialized web pages using HTML or FB (Facebook) code providing a fantastic free form of advertisement.
Blogging
Blogging is one of the best ways to increase your online exposure. The most popular platform for blogging is WordPress and there are a multitude of great plugins available to help enhance your blogs appearance and status on the Internet. For SEO purposes, a plugin one should not be without is called “All in One SEO” which assists in the detailing of keywords and descriptions of your posts ensuring search engine friendly data. The more you post, the greater your online exposure.
Online Directories
Online directories are a great way to increase a websites exposure. There are a host of free online directories which will list your business / website. A simple Google search will throw up pages and pages of directories. Most of them appreciate a reciprocal link on your website and will speed up the time taken to get listed, but they are not mandatory. Some online directories will have you listed in a matter of hours while others can take up to 6 months to acknowledge your listing. Its possible to spend many hours just registering your website on these online directories but every new link assists in boosting your online rating.
Google Adwords
All the methods to improve SEO mentioned so far have been free options. Of course there are some Online Directories that would like you to pay for their services but those can be avoided. If you do wish to spend money improving the visibility of your website, there is no better option than going with Google Adwords. The general idea behind Google Adwords is that you create an advert with a Title, Description and Link and apply specific keywords to that ad which related to your website. The more relevant your keywords are to the search term, the more likely your ad will be displayed in the “Sponsored Links” sections of the Google Search results.
Using Google Adwords is free until people start slicking on your advertising links. You can define how much you are willing to pay per click. The higher the cost behind each click, the more likely your ad is to be displayed. Getting the most out of Google Adwords is not something that can be learned overnight. It takes a lot of work to generate ads based on user searches and will require a lot of your time in doing research on how to attain the best visibility using it for the most keyword combinations. If you have the money to spend, why not give it a try and see what improvement you get. You can always pause your ads at a later stage preventing them from displaying and consequently not spending more money.
Conclusion
These are just some of the many options available when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. SEO is an increadibly important aspect of web design and should be taken very seriously. The higher a clients ranking, the greater the exposure online and therefore the greater the exposure of your web design company. Although setting up a blog and Social Networking sites can be tiresome, there benefits out-weight the trouble and it is highly recommended that one takes advantages of the opportunities available.
As for the other files mentioned above such as the robots.txt and sitemap.xml files, they should be standard with any website that is developed. I found it useful to create a sample project folder containing all the extra files and when a new web design project commences, all these files are just copied into the directory and updated before launch.
I hope this post has helped identify some of the key areas and aspects associated with web design and SEO and will allow for more visible websites in the future.
Tags: Design, Development, SEO, Website