Free SEO – Article 2 – Quality & Relevance

QUALITY & RELEVANCE
Quality refers to the following areas of your website;

1. Site Structure
2. Site Content
3. Navigation
4. External Links

Site Structure
The first thing to consider is obviously the domain name you choose. It’s important for corporate identity and protect your brand to buy at least the .com and .co.uk for your company name but before starting your consumer facing website think about the relevance of your company name vs your product range. For example if your company name is Joe Bloggs Ltd and you sold building materials, is www.joebloggs.com the right domain name to use or would www.buildingmaterials.com be better?
A good idea is to have both, the first for a corporate website describing your business and history etc. and a domain name that better describes your actual products for an ecommerce enabled site.
Another option is use a sub-domain of your corporate website such as http://building-materials.joebloggs.com .

For static websites the structure of your website is vital when it comes to search engines visiting your site, it needs to be setup in a way that the “spiders” can easily find their way around and understand what they are looking at.

Firstly make sure that where possible your page names reflect their content e.g. a page about lawnmowers should not be called “product12.html” but be called “lawnmowers.html”. This then also applies to your folders on your web server, for the same example this should be something like http://www.mycompany.com/gardening-products/lawnmowers.html

Notice the separating of the folder/category title in this example being “gardening-products” as opposed to “gardeningproducts” adding the “-“ makes the URL clearer and easier to read. For page titles and images separate words with either “_” or “-“, avoid using spaces as these are replaced by “%20” in the internet browsers.
NOTE: This does NOT apply to dynamically created websites such as most  hosted online shops

Sitemap

You should also include a sitemap.xml file on the root of your server. This is essentially a simply formatted text file that provides information about all of the pages in your website in one file. If the software that you used to create your website provide one automatically you can generate one at XML Sitemaps for free at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com.

“80% of search engine users never look past the first three pages”

Site Content

Think carefully when creating the pages of your website, inserting lot’s of images can make the page look clumsy and take a long time to load.

Images

If you use any images always make sure to give them a description using the “ALT” value. ALT means “Alternate Text” and is very important for the search engines to understand what the image relates to, so for example for your websites logo the source code would look like;

<img src=”mycompany_logo.gif” width=”100px” height=”25px” alt=”My Company Logo” />

Note also the name of the image ”mycompany_logo.gif” gives an idea of what it is there to describe.

Links

Any links whether they are internal or external, from text or from an image, should have a description or “title” value. This helps in two ways, firstly by telling the search engine more information about what it will find and also for adding valuable text & keywords into your page. For example if this were a link to your “About Us” page it might look like:

<a href=”about_us.html” title=”Click to find out more information about My Company”>About Us</a>

Or for a page about ”Products”

<a href=”products.html” title=”Our products and services including Website Design, Search Engine Optimisation and Hosting”>Products</a>

And from your logo to return to your home page

<a href=”index.html” title=”Return to our home page”><img src=”mycompany_logo.gif” width=”100px” height=”25px” alt=”My Company Logo” /></a>

“A picture speaks a thousand words……. or does it??? Not to a search engine!”

Textual Content

Having plenty of relevant text is essential, though “RELEVANT” is the key word here! Pages and pages of text are going to bore your visitors just as lots of images will confuse them. If you aren’t sure about where to start the best thing to do is look at your competition. Do a search in Google for the keywords you want to get high rankings for and look in detail at the first ten results for the following things:

1. Title – In the top of your browser
2. Use of the keyword(s) within their pages
3. How long their product descriptions are
4. Are they using external content such as linking or embedding Wiki articles or user reviews

This may sound simple but at the end of the day if they are in the Top 10 results their websites are working for them!!

Navigation

Would you go on holiday and not take a map (or GPS!) if not and there were no street signs how would you know where to go?

This is exactly the same for your website if you have poor navigation your visitors won’t hang around they will go to your competition. The same is true with the search engine spiders if they can’t “crawl” your website easily they won’t bother. The XML sitemap is a good start but there are some simple things you do with the rest of the navigation for SEO purposes.

Firstly (taking into account the links section of this document) where possible use text links with CSS styling for your menus as opposed to images.

Have more than one menu, for example a “top menu” and a “side menu”. A common use of this would be to have the “About Us & Contact Us” type links in the “top menu” and “product category” type links in a “side menu”. The more direct links to your content pages the better.

If you have lots of links that you want to use in a single menu but are worried it is going to look a mess, consider using AJAX/Javascript to create a dynamic menu. You can find some readymade scripts at the following links:

www.dynamicdrive.com

http://plugins.jquery.com

www.mootools.com

http://javascript.internet.com

www.dhtmlgoodies.com

“The Footer”

The “Footer” of your web pages are a great place to add links as most visitors don’t look at it. This is generally where you place legal notices such as © and company registration numbers.

Some good examples of this are www.download.com and http://business.bt.com both use this area to fill it with links to the main areas of their website to make it as simple as possible for the search engines to find their way around.

This is also a good area to place discreet back links to other relevant websites and websites that require you to link back to them before they place a link to you such as some free business directories and forums.

You should also link to your XML sitemap file and if possible to a HTML (web page) version as well.

“Just as it is important in business to network and be linkedin, it is just as important for your website”

External Links & Content

Linking to external websites and specifically to similar or related content is a very useful tool for the search engines perception of the importance of your site. There are masses of freely available content you can use from YouTube videos through to product ratings, Wikipedia content and News Feeds.

If used in the right way this can add value for your visitors, as well as additional content and relevant cross reference links for the search engines.

Embedding External Content

There are many different ways you can embed external content within your website, for example some packages come with their own RSS Widget’s to allow you to easily embed RSS feeds from anywhere. The most common ways to embed external content are:

1. RSS Feeds for news feeds and frequently updated content
2. Widgets – often used for embedding weather information and location maps
3. External Embed – Such as embedding Videos from YouTube where the content is hosted elsewhere or product reviews.

RSS Feeds

RSS Feeds or “Really Simple Syndication” as it stands for are structured in a very similar way to your XML sitemap. They are essentially the textual content from external web pages that can be “pulled” into your website. There are a number of reasons why it is great to embed them;

1. The content in the Feed changes often which makes your website more “alive” to the search engines, very useful if you don’t change the content regularly as the more frequently your website changes the more frequently the search engines will visit your website.
2. If you have space to fill on your site they can provide free relevant up to date content which looks professional and is informative for your visitors.

Sources for RSS feeds are everywhere from BBC News to Blogger just do a search for RSS & the topic e.g. “RSS Technology” or create your own from a site such as Moreover.com. There are many free tools available to embed these feeds in your site such as www.feedzilla.com and www.newsfeedmaker.com.

Widgets

Widgets are a great way to add content to your site, you might have noticed local weather or travel information on a local businesses website. There are millions of widgets available on the web, some good places to start are www.widgetbox.com and bravenet.com.

External Embedding

Embedding external content is perhaps the easiest way to add someone elses content to your website. You’ll notice on a lot of websites such as YouTube you’ll have a “share this” or “embed” area which will contain code similar to the following:

<object width=”560″ height=”340″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/TDZUIMlMq7c&hl=en&fs=1&”></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/TDZUIMlMq7c&hl=en&fs=1&” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”560″ height=”340″></embed></object>

All you then need to do is paste this code into your webpage where you want it to appear. In this YouTube example which is embedding a Flash video you can also change the parameter param name=”movie” to whatever you like, this example is a Michael Jackson video so I might want to change this to param name=”My Favourite Michael Jackson Video” to tell the search engines why it is there.

External Links

Any other external links should always be relevant to your website’s content and don’t be scared to change the “title” value in an external link to something more relevant such as “Free Business Directory” you could change to “Builders Directory” or anything else you like. When signing up to Free Business Directories that require a link back to their site always try and link back to the page on their directory that contains your information.

Check back tomorrow for Article 3 “Popularity”, or if you can’t wait you can download the full guide here