A website with useful and informative content is more likely to attract visitors and induce them to return.
- When you compose your page text, try to utilize the words that users might plug in as search queries in their search for the information on your site.
- Spelling: Be sure to spell-check your site and have a third party read through and check grammar. Writing copy for a website differs from print, books, magazines, and newspapers. We will be adding more about copywriting to this page later.
- The text on an HTML page should be at most 180 kilobytes.
- Facilitate navigation through your website by providing a static text link for every page.
- Text in an image is not indexable; if you want important information to be indexed on a search query, ensure it is placed outside of all images, including your company logo. ALT tags for images can help but will not replace the strength of live viewable text on your site.
- A site map is much like a roadmap or driving directions, except its purpose is served by enabling the search spiders to locate all of your pages and encounter links embedded in menus, list boxes, and other similar website components not readable by search engines.
- The site hierarchy should always be maintained such that every page should have a distance of only one to three clicks from the home page. This might pose a problem on larger sites, but we always warn our clients to give the users of their site a clear path to all content.
Unethical Search Engine Optimization Techniques
The practices described below not only annoy web surfers who encounter them, but all the major search engines prohibit them, which can result in your site being banned from their indices. Please be considerate and do not add to the disarray that already exists, thanks to fraudulent SEO schemes.
- Keyword spamming: Artificially inflating a page’s keyword density by packing irrelevant words. This includes creating huge image ALT tags that people will more than likely never see.
- Visitors to your website should be able to read your text. Hiding text or links by making them the same color as the background or by using a no-view tag is detectable by the search engines and, in some cases, will lower your rank or possibly ban your site altogether.
- Making link farms to give the appearance that there are more links to your website. This is very widely used by black hat SEO companies
- Creating doorway pages specifically designed for search engines.
Will changing my hosting company or IP address affect my search engine ranking?
Changing your hosting company or IP address won’t affect your website ranking or your SEO strategy as long as you migrate your site to a different IP address using the following guidelines:
- Load all of the files of your present website to your new IP address.
- Change your name servers so that they point to the new DNS servers or your new IP address.
- Upon seeing that all major search engines have spidered your website, it will be safe to take down your website on your old server.
