Do It Yourself, Optimizing a Website: Part 2
In following-up last week's article, "Do It Yourself, Optimizing a Website: Part 1," here are the next three tips that will help with your website's search engine optimization. Lucky for you -- these topics of interest are brief and easy to apply. If you haven't already applied these optimizing methods to your website, be sure to spend some time editing its content to meet these standards!
- File Names: A Simple Rule
- Keyword Stuffing: This isn't Thanksgiving & your website isn't a Turkey - so don't overstuff it!
- Headings and Sub-headings:
V. File Names: A Simple Rule
Common practice is to give little or no thought about the names of files uploaded to your website. However any file, especially images and pdfs, that are presented and accessible through the live portion of your website will be scanned by search engine crawlers and catalogued based on their file name. Now if you are trying to optimize a page for a specific keyword phrase, and if you remember that every bit counts -- than why skip over such an easy SEO booster? Instead of Google cataloguing a map of Leaside as 101010.jpeg, it instead reads: BuyaLeasideHomeMap.jpeg, this proper file name will help search engines identify the central topic of your page, and acts as one of those small helpful compounding factors when it comes to SEO.
VI. Keyword Stuffing: This isn't Thanksgiving and your website isn't a Turkey - so don't overstuff it!
So you've made a firm decision on your keyword phrase and now want to build a web-page around it. Perfect! However a common misconception with search engine optimization is, if a little is good, a lot must be better. Keyword stuffing is a prime example of the adage 'less is more'. When a search engine crawler evaluates the content of your page to determine its central topic, it will notate any reoccurring phrases (i.e. keyword phrases), and it is in large part through this in how your web-page is ranked.
Now if a crawler scans over your web-page's content, and finds a series of redundant sentences which sole purpose is to try and boost the page's ranking, the crawler will reflect such content negatively. Moreover if you try and hide additional keywords, masking them by using the same colour font the page's background, it too will be weighed negatively. If you avoid making these common mistakes, and truly work to blend in your keyword phrase within the content, you will be helping maximize your web-page's search engine optimization.
VII. Headings and Sub-Headings:
Given the nature of the real estate business, it is common to find text heavy web-pages. After all there is much more information to offer than just the types of housing for sale, be it from what is in the surrounding community to the local schools, to places of worship and even grocery stores. A good rule of thumb to use is to think of your web-page like a news article: it has a headline, a sub-heading -- both of which describe the topic of the article (or your page's keyword phrases), and then the article.
Why does the newspaper format their articles in such a way? Because it helps break-up the plain text, giving the eye something to gravitate toward, to read and to captivate and engage them long enough so that they hopefully read the article. Take the same approach with your web-pages. If your page has a treasure trove worth of valuable information, but it is clumped together and lacking any form of labeling it becomes cumbersome and ultimately a detraction to the user as they are forced to scour through the content to find the information they want.
By adding a heading and sub-headings to your pages, it allows you to better define the different topics and points of interest so that someone browsing the page can quickly navigate to the information of interest and begin reading. Moreover adding in headings and sub-headings is another easy way to incorporate your keyword phrases without overstuffing your pages.
Authored By: Bryan Coughlin, Client Relations