Let him find you easily ....

I’ve been asked a number of times to get a web site to appear in the top of Google’s Search Engine Results pages, but in most cases the client is unaware that it’s a lengthy process (a few months to get a showing) and that it requires many things to be put in place.

First there’s On Page optimisation:

Getting the correct Keywords and using them in the -

Page Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords, Body text, H1 Headings, Bold Text, Anchor Texts and Image Alt texts.

And you should make sure links between pages are not through images or Flash menus (ie are able to be followed by search engine bots).

Also there’s the Site Load Speed. There’s a great plugin for FireFox called Page Speed for checking just that.  Amongst a zillion things it checks for are that image dimensions are specified, images are optimised and scaled, the order of styles and scripts are optimised, CSS is put in the document head, the character set is specified early, CSS expressions are avoided, JavaScript loading is deferred till needed and Resources are served from a consistent URL.

And if you want to rank for local search use geo meta tags, put your local address on page bottoms, and your local address and phone (not a generic 0845 number or similar) in Contact Us.

You should also create an xml sitemap and register it with the search engines.

Generate new content on a regular basis. Having a blog or forum helps. Don’t forget to update the site map along with the content.

Then there’s Off-page optimisation:

Which basically means getting as many good links back to your site (they’re called backlinks). A good link means that the site that is linking to you is relevant to your site, is respected and has a good page rank. You can do this by registering with reputable directories, Google local and Yahoo local if relevant, blogging well (not just spam blogs) and leaving a link to your site, having a YouTube page that has updated content and a reference to your site, a Picassa page, a Slideshare page and other similar sites that can reference your site.

Social bookmarking of relevant content helps too.

Did I forget anything…?

Find the right balance

To get your website seen in the top of the the search engine result pages (serps), you need to choose the right keywords and key phrases before you even begin creating your site. (see my article: All in one Web Design and SEO)

When people make a search they will type in 2-word phrases more than 3-word phrases. 1-word phrases get fewer searches, as do 4, 5 or more, the keyword phrase getting fewer uses the longer it gets.

That means that long keyword phrases get less traffic.

But because longer keyword phrases are more specific, they are therefore more targeted.

So there is a trade-off between long, specific, targeted keyword phrases, and traffic.

The longer and the more precise your keyword phrases are, the quicker you’ll get your traffic because its easier to optimise a site using a specific phrase. However, you’ll also get fewer visitors too, but – they are there because they were looking precisely for your keyword phrase, so they will also convert more into customers.

The best solution is to use three-word or even four-word key phrases that express your visitor’s needs.

The market is full of tools that promise the top 10 positions in Google, 1000 backlinks in seconds and so on.

Here is a list of things NOT to do in a link building strategy.

1 . Do not submit your site to more than 50 directories in a month. These should be types of directories where are you are sure that your site will appear.

Submit to more and you will get the sandbox effect on your site – that is pages that are in sandbox drop lots of positions and end up on the bottom of the rankings and stay there for a lot of time. (see here for more)

2. Do not make link exchanges site-wide. Site wide means with the whole site. You will see it doesn’t help you more than a link exchange with a relevant page that is positioning good in SERPS (Search engine result pages).

3. Do not place your link in forum signatures.You will see no difference in SERPS.Why? Its like the site-wide link exchange but more irrelevant.

4. Do not make link exchanges with sites that have more than 100 links on a page (internal links and external links). First of all Google will see that page as spammy.

Another reason is that the PR juice (- the benefit of connecting to pages with a high ranking) be divided into 100 pieces and you will have 1/100 of the “cake”.

5.  Do not use stupid anchors. If you submit your site to a directory articles or somewhere else. Only use the Keywords that you want to optimize.

6 . Don’t use the same anchor more than once on a page. In exchanging links, if an anchor is used on a page more than once to different sites, there will be a problem. What should you do? Add a dash “-“ to the anchor if  you can’t use other keywords. Why? If you search seo or seo – in Google you get same results.

7. Do not make lots of backlinks in a short time without them being completely relevant!! You will get the sandbox effect! (see 1. above)

8. Link exchanges or one way links MUST BE MADE only with relevant content to your site. DONT LOOK for Page Rank.You need higher ranks in SERPS not a bigger PAGE RANK.

9. In exchanging links, use URLS that have keywords in them. This is crucial.

10. Do not create more than one site on the same IP just for exchanging links between them. There’s no value in that.

11. Do not just make link exchanges with the home page of the site. Use internal pages from your site.

Source: How to not start link building for a site – mistakes in seo

Here are Some good tips from: The Three Golden Rules of Site Redesigns
by Jon Raasch

2. Avoid Losing Search Engine Rankings
One of the most important things when overhauling a site is to make sure the new site doesn’t lose any search engine ranking. Sure, any restructuring will probably cause an “awkward adolescence” as Google reindexes your site’s pages, but there are a number of things you can do to make it less painful.

First, make sure you don’t lose any of your old site’s title tags or meta descriptions (or meta keywords if you believe in that sort of thing).

Additionally, keep any of the old URIs the same if at all possible. But if you have a really good reason for changing them, make sure to use 301 redirects. Even Google says so.

A 301 redirect tells Google that a page has moved permanently, meaning that it should take all of the search engine mojo it had given the old link and transfer it to the new one.

So make sure to 301 redirect every page that has moved. I would also 301 redirect any pages that have been removed, and point each to a related page on your site.

The easiest way to set up 301 redirects on an Apache web server is with .htaccess. Here’s a quick tutorial.  Alternately, you can set the document header information using PHP or a number of other methods.

Last but not least, make sure to change any rules in your robots.txt and send a new Sitemap off to Google as soon as you launch.