When someone goes to Google and types in a search term like “fitness center Vancouver” or “Vancouver dentist”, there are about 200 things that a search engine like Google or Bing will check in a spit second. It compares the findings from your website to all other websites that use these words. This is called an “organic” or unpaid search, and it’s a dynamic process that changes from hour to hour, and day to day.
Read more about organic searches
Some days you’ll find yourself on page one – a few days later you might be on page 20. Some people are lucky and have unique words that make them one of the few sites to be found for that topic. Other sites have topics with enormous competition. You might be one of the lucky ones right now, but eventually all search terms are going to be extremely competitive. Your position in search engine results is called your “visibility”. The words people search for are called your “keywords”.
The question is, how can you build a website that matches most of what Google is looking for?
There are three main ways to get your website “optimized”, or working really well for search engines. One depends on the way your visible site pages are built – these are the pages your visitors see. Two depends on the invisible code behind your pages – this is carefully chosen text or words that your website developer adds. Three depends on the quality of your back links, or referring sites – these are the websites that are linking to yours.
1. CHECK YOUR VISIBLE WEB PAGES
First, in terms of how your site is built and how the public sees your site – this is quite different from how search engines see it. Search engines are blind. They can’t see anything. If you have a site with a lot of pictures or animations, they’re not going to see anything. Your pages just look blank. No pictures, no design, no logo, no banner, nothing but text. This is why search engines don’t like sites built with Flash or frames. They’re looking for any text they can find, and they’re analyzing the different kinds of text you have on your site before adding each page to their indexes.
See your site the way a search engine sees it
Visit the Lynx search engine simulator, type in the name of your website, and see the view that search engines “read”.
If your web pages don’t have titles with text that matches the search term, your site isn’t going to be found as easily as a web page on someone else’s site. If the menu links on your site don’t contain the right words, or if the text on your site doesn’t contain the right words in sufficient number, it’s not going to be found as easily as someone else’s site.
Search engines check the percentage of keywords on each page to non-keywords, looking for something bad called keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is the “black hat” SEO process of repeating the same words and phrases multiple times in the same piece of text, so search engines will think your webpage is a good example of that keyword and list you near the top of the results. SEO companies have made a lot of money in recent years by editing the visible and invisible text on people’s websites, adding multiple versions of the same keywords into both your visible and invisible text – such as “Vancouver dentist”, “dentist Vancouver”, “dentistry Vancouver”, “dentist in Vancouver”, etc. This will get your site black-listed.
Search engines want to see a lot of varied text and at least 250 words on each webpage.
They also check to see if your site uses the same text as another site – that is, if someone has copied part of your text or if you’ve copied theirs. This is called “content scraping”. It takes a split second for search engines to match your text with text on millions of other sites, and they will penalize you for duplication.
To make sure search engines visit all your pages, you should have a sitemap written in xml, added to your root directory, and submitted to the major search engines. If your site architecture is not built with a clear page layout and a site map, a search engine is not going to find all your pages. As a result, the information on your missing pages will not be searchable. For example, a dentist might have a whole special section on “teeth whitening” that they’re not finding.
You can check to see how many of your web pages have been indexed by a search engine like Google then update your sitemap to be sure all pages are being noticed.
Determine which pages of your site have been indexed by a search engine.
Go to www.google.com or www.bing.com then type the following words in the search box: site:www.mywebsitename.com
Substitute the name of your site for the words “mywebsitename”. The whole phrase should be run together, as shown, with no spaces.
2. CHECK YOUR INVISIBLE CODE
The second area of concern is the invisible code. It’s really important to pay attention to the visible text but the hidden text is almost as important.
Validation
First, every site should have an html validation check to make sure there are no W3C errors. The World Wide Web Consortium sets the standards for how all website source code should be done.
Meta tags
There are several important kinds of invisible text, and the most important are called meta tags.
Check your meta tags. This is one of the easiest things to do. Go to a browser like Google and type in your site address. Next, look at the main menu of your browser, where it says File/ Edit/ View
Look under View for the word Source. A new window will open filled with text information. Near the top of your source code you should see meta-tags, which are written by your developer for search engines. First and most important, you need a meta tag for page title that is written with keywords. You can have up to 65 characters in each title, or 10-15 words.
Next look for a meta tag for the site description. This should also contain keywords and you can have up to 40 words, preferably in phrases. Search engines prefer two and three-word phrases to single words. If you have an SEO plugin installed on your WordPress site, a counter will tell you how many characters are left as you type.
Vary your keywords
Every page of your website needs to have different meta tags. Someone needs to sit down and look at every page of your site and come up with the best search terms for that page, and analyze what makes that page different from all the rest, and put those unique words in your meta tags.
Find the keywords in the text on your webpage
This handy tool will show you how search engines see your keywords. Go to your website and copy a page of text then paste it into the box provided.
If you have a blog, your developer needs to install an SEO plugin for you to add and modify your tags.
Types of Wordpress SEO plugins
Verifications
Once the keyword tags are in, your developer can go to the major search engines and get something called verification codes. This is like a special key or password from each of the major search engines.
Alt tags
The third area of concern is the pictures on your site, which include things like your banner or logo or other graphics. Every one of these needs a special tag called an alt tag that tells the search engine what it is.
3. CHECK YOUR BACK LINKS
The third important area of search engine optimization is the number and quality of back links for your website. These are websites that link to yours. They should be good solid sites with authority, like the Kitsilano Chamber of Commerce. The’re also called inbound links, referring links and external links. You can do a check to see what back links you already have, then try to add to them.
Who’s linking to you? Go to Google or Bing and type in the search box:
links:www.mywebsitename.com
Substitute the name of your site for the words “mywebsitename”. The whole phrase should be run together, as shown, with no spaces.
You should always check your back links. Sites can easily be picked up and added to directories without the owners of the site ever knowing. Some of these directories have bad reputations.
Indexing
Search engines keep a tally of all the bad things as well as the good things – it’s part of what is called indexing your site and building up your page ranking. There’s an online directory called DMOZ that can help you get started with good links. Many search engines visit DMOZ to add sites because the DMOZ submissions are edited by real people who have already vetted them as good, reliable sites.
Reciprocal links
Search engines really prefer one-way links – links that go from your site out to another, or from another site to yours, but not necessarily both ways. So be careful with reciprocal links – they’re not necessarily good.
There are also many public directories you can link to or from. Do a search for directories in your topic area – jewellry stores, real estate agents, salons or tailors – whatever suits the theme and content of your site.
Links to or from social media sites like your own Facebook page are good, as long as you have a lot of content on your Facebook page and you post at least once or twice a week. Because they’re dated, other people’s social media pages on Facebook (as well as posts on blogs) are considered less and less important by search engines as time goes by.
Site updates
Another good tip is to update your web pages frequently. Google and other search engines are constantly “crawling” the Internet looking for new pages and new content on your site. To stay competitive, keep adding good content.
Google Analytics
After you get a good start doing some of these things, you need a way to follow up and see how well they’re working. You’ll want to install some scripts to collect visitor statistics.
Tools like Google Analytics show you exactly how many people use each of your search terms and will help you identify new ones. Your developer simply adds a snippet of code with your unique Google Analytics number into your invisible text, which in turn places a cookie on each visitor’s computer. Anonymous information can then be collected – such as whether the visitor has been to your site before (a new or a returning visitor), the time of each visit, the referring site, and the popularity and effectiveness of different content areas.
What does Google Analytics do for you?
Follow your web statistics
Also be sure to ask your developer if your web stats are turned on. Most servers automatically run the programs Awstats and Webalizer for free on your site so you can analyze your visitors and find out where they’re from, which sites they came from before yours, what browsers they’re using, what keywords they used to find you in search engines, which search engine is used the most, which web pages are the most popular – just like Google Analytics, lots of really useful information for you and your web developer.
