The Must-Have Essentials for Proper Website SEO
SEO-What Visitors Never See Can Mean Your Site Will Never Be Seen
We’ve discussed how you can develop content to improve SEO (search engine optimization) for your website. But if the site isn’t designed, built and maintained correctly, Google will give it a low ranking and your content efforts will go to waste. Here are 5 things Google needs to see in order to display your site in its search results.
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Sitemap.
The sitemap makes every page of your website visible to search engines, even the pages with few or no elements that they could find when crawling the Internet. Create both XML and HTML versions. A clear site structure and sitemap will also improve your chances that Google will show site links for specific pages in addition to your main URL.
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Meta data.
Title tags and meta descriptions incorporating keywords will help prove your relevance to search engines. Make sure they’re on every page of your site, and that they’re written to Google specifications: not too short, too long or duplicated on multiple pages.
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Coding.
Make it easy for Google to understand your website with current site building technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets. By minimizing the amount of HTML coding on each page, you not only increase text readability, you also improve the text-to-code ratio which Google uses to assess site quality.
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Navigation structure.
The more frequently pages are linked within your site, the higher your Google page authority flow. Make those links plain text; search engines can’t recognize image or animation links. It’s also important not to let pages with no chance of getting a high search engine rating (such as the contact page) drag down the site’s overall ranking. Add a special code that tells search engines not to index those pages.
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Web host.
You may think you’re getting a good deal by going with the cheapest provider. But if that web server also hosts sites Google doesn’t like, such as pornography, you could get tarred with the same brush and sent to the bottom of the search engine results pages.
These 5 tips barely scratch the surface of back end techniques that can improve SEO for websites. And there’s no getting around it, you really need to be an expert to do it right. If you’d like to learn how our experts at ACS use state-of-the-art SEO technology for building and maintaining websites, please give us a call.