Website optimization is more than just a passing fad, it is the new fulcrum that determines if an online business ranks or tanks in today’s hyper-competitive online environment. Gone are the days when a few adjustments to meta tags and submitting a website through the add url tool were considered website optimization. Now with more possible ways to rank or deter rankings for your website, a holistic approach is needed in order to eliminate any potential obstacles that could interfere with your search engine placement.
With the search engines constantly changing the criteria and algorithms that produce the results we see as an end user, keeping your website nimble is the best way to adapt and overcome controversy.
Use a template, but make sure to vary the text enough so that each page does not appear the same.
Use 750-1000 words per page to avoid being overlooked or worse yet, getting trapped in the Google supplemental index.
Make updates regularly or add new content with new keywords, but make sure that your content management system allows the new portions of your website ample links. Make sure the new content has 10-15 links to support it from outside sources if you ever wat to see it rank independently aside from your internal link structure.
Spread the links out, if you are buying links from directories or developing links through article marketing or promotion.
Make sure you provide a proportionate balance of the links to different pages. Starving your website for backlinks is a crime punishable by zero rankings. Deep linking can result in developing a foothold for various terms as the entire site begins to cross reference keywords and rise naturally in the rankings the more you build.
Make sure to vary your anchor text (the links that point to and from your pages) instead of using all keywords so that your links appear natural and avoid getting penalized.
One the server side, instead of deleting pages, use a 301 redirect instead. This way you prevent broken links in your website hierarchy. Fixing the preference from the server side with a .htaccess file can also prevent duplicate content issues down the road, if your site is split between the http:// or www. format. Unifying the website defaults for your server headers is one small step in the right direction, but now more than ever, hardware and adjustments to the drivers and components that affect performance, DNS issues and other related off page website optimization factors can add a boost to rankings without even touching one character of code.
Website optimization and development have taken on an entirely new meaning as the technology continues to evolve and search engine programmers are imbuing the algorithms with an almost artificial intelligence for logical selection when dealing with the quality of the content it indexes. Those who fail to keep up to date with the latest optimization methods fall short in the rankings and in providing a valued service.
If you start hearing statements from your SEO company like, perhaps we should try this method, or maybe we can build some links to offset the competition, it may be time to move on and find someone with a firm grip on the situation who can provide analytics, assess the competition and stay one step ahead of emerging trends so you can catch the wave of hot keywords for your industry and ride it all the way to the bank.
