SEO GuideBy Daniel KerrCreated on 3rd September 2004Last Revised 9th September 2004 Version 1.1 Introduction I have noticed that quite a lot of our web site are no longer gaining page rank and also we are not listed as well as we can be in many search engines. When I first came to work for PortaPower we had a web site ranking in 1st position for nearly all our products and I would like to try to get us back there. I have created this guide to hopefully improve the situation for Hong Kong team and China.
Clean HTML Code Header Layout Cloaking Html Formatting Titles images Site Map Site Structure Url's Linking Page Rank
Clean HTML Code A lot of webs designers do not know that there is a standard for writing HTML in. It is very important that the html code is written in w3c standards because Google and many other search engines use these standards as a factor when determine the position of a web site. I have noticed that web site page rank increase's to 2 very quickly if all the coding is correct. Would not you agree that if there are coding standards then search engines would use this as a deciding factor on search positions TO Test Your Site You Should Go To http://validator.w3.org. I Have Tested The Site http://www.payless-batteries.com as an example: The results: this number of errors is not to high But I can Image Some of the Sites Will Have over 100% Error Free! It is not just the main page. neededs to be done, all pages need to be checked such asset, Site Map, Product, Category, Etc. Most Errors Have Probably Occurred Because of PEOP le using Dreamweaver in design view and not changing back to code view to remove redundant tags. Unfortunately there are to many errors and different ways to fix them to be listed here. To fix the errors you should try typing in the error messages into Google and Research Ways of Correcting Them.back to Top
Header Below is a problem caused by a setting up the headers incorrectly. Google can not spider the page properly because the whoever set this site up did not include a description and keywords tag. If the headers are setup incorrectly then Google will not index the page , the page will not get page rank and nobody can search for the products listed on the web pages with bad headers This is the code for the header that was used:. How to write a header:! Set the document type
Do Not USE
"As this will stop Google from indexing your site. Title Tag should be no more than 68 characters. Description Tag should be no more than 200 characters. Keywords Tag should be no more than 20 words. Do not use a static header that will be the same for all pages. Make the header dynamic so it is relevant to the product or category that is being shown. Set the description as a dynamic sentence that will repeat the keywords you want people to find your web page with. If you are going TO Use CSS Make Sure You Put Down Before In Before The "" ". You can see the header is correct or not: http://www.widexl.com/remote/search-ENGINES /METATAG -analyzer.html It takes 1 month before Google's spider visits a web site and updates its information. Please make sure you correct these problems so Google will display the page information properly. This will need to be done for all sites and all pages.Back To TOP
Layout The first words Google's spider will come to is what will be displayed in the Google search results description. A lot of the web sites we have do not even display a description because of a badly thought out layout. As you can see from the example below the "About us", "Battery Tips" etc., we do not want displayed in the description. Only use typed links when the words being used in the link are relevant to the page content. Here is a good example where " My Account "," My Cart "," Checkout "Are actally images. This will be displayed in Google As: Note!
The sentence should be the same as your dynamic description meta tag. Use dynamic sentences that will change to fit the description of the product or category. Set as a dynamic sentence that will repeat the keywords you want people to find your web page with.Back To TOP
Cloaking Another method we can use to make the page look good without showing a lot of unwanted keywords or links is called cloaking. Cloaking will display text that Google's spider will see but customer visiting the sight will not see. Google does not allow cloaking so we Need to be careful if we users: ??. hidden {margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; font-size: 0px; Visibility: hidden;} if you want to use this method you shouth many sentences up that will change dynamically and are related to the product or category being displayed. After the sentences are finished use the "class =" hidden "" code to hide the text. You can also do this with links to other sites. Example : Camcorder battery you can add all the company web sites with high page ranks and link them on the main page your web site where the page rank is at the highest If you notice the page rank will be the highest on the main page and then. Go Lower on All The Other Pages.
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HTML Formatting HTML formatting is just as important as keeping it error free. If you are going to make a web site you should always use the correct tags. Example you should use the "
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Titles We had blamed the changing in rankings to Google banning our advertising in Adwords but at the same time we where told to add the word replacement at the front of our site the titles. We should not use words "Replacement", "Compatible", "High Capacity" in the titles. When customers are looking for a "IBM thinkPad 760 laptop battery" they are no going to type in "Replacement, Compatible or High Capacity IBM thinkPad 760 laptop battery". Google gives a site a high position if the keywords used are close to the title of the site. If people are using "IBM thinkPad 760 laptop battery" to search we should use that as the title and nothing else. I know we will have trouble from our customers and IBM if we advertise our products as IBM brand name but we do not need to say these are replacements in the titles If we put the that the products are replacement or compatible and High capacity in the products description should be fine Another bad example:.. The title is to Long and Also I t is referring to many replacement products. The structure of this web site should be changed to similar as payless-batteries.com where it will display one product via fit model or replacement model. Note! The Heading title should be the same as in the
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Images Using images instead of typed words can improve the keyword density. It is very important to only use words that are related to the product or category. Short sentences are ok as long as they have the keywords relating to the current page in them. Do not use typed words for About us, Contact Us, Shopping Cart, company, shipping policy, etc. It is only using up more words and confusing Google about what keywords are relevant to the web page. You can see the keyword density of your site here http://www.widexl.com/remote/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html If the web page is about "laptop batteries" then you should hope to get around 10% keywords density of the words laptop batteries and other keywords like laptop battery to 5%. Note! All Images should have alt tags in them. If you display the picture of of a product on a product information page then the picture should have the alt tag the same as the title of the page. If the image is a line to a category kiln category should be in the alt tag. If you are displaying a picture of a laptop then the alt tag should say "laptop". Google gives high page rank to sites that have alt tags for all their images because it.
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Site map Site map is very important especially to a site with a large amount of pages. Google and most search engines likes a web site only 3 layers deep because they do not have time to go through many links on a site. Some sites are Layer 1 Main PageLayer 2 Laptop BatteriesLayer 3 AcerLayer 4 AcerNote 760CLayer 5 NAC003As you can see www.payless-batteries.com is 5 layers deep and the way you can get around this problem is with a site map. Unfortunately Google likes pages that have less then 100 links on them. If the site has over 100 links it can be classed as spam. The best way to get around this is to create a site map that display 1-100 products and then display another 1000 products via a different link. web site name hereweb site name here As I said a site map is very important to a web site with a large number of pages. If the site has to many layers then the product pages will not be indexed. Also If a web page has more Than 100 Links It Will Not Be Indexed Either. After I Di d this to my web site I have now over 4,080 indexed pages on Google. Note! Remember that you should not just have 100 product page links on a site map you should count all links such as "about us", "privacy" etc. So That The Total Number Of Link is 100. You Can Check The Number of Links on The Pages by Using this Tool http://www.widexl.com/remote/search-Engines/metatag-analyzer.html
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Site Structure We are running sites with over 1000 products that fit more than 10,000 different products. We do not have the time and resources to be using static pages. All sites should be changed into dynamic web sites. If you want to keep the. HTML EXTENSION IT I EASY TO Add this to in apache so what That ".html" Extension will do ".html" extension will execute pHP code. if people need new help to do this i'm Sure I can help and also there are people people in sz factory That Can Help . Back to top
URL's Current we are using URL's are like this: http://www.payless-batteries.com/part1.php?fclassname=TGFwdG9w&fb_babrand=RFRL&fb_bamodel=Q0dSLUIvVDE5U0U=&fb_bacode=1345 We should change them into search engine safe URL's Search engines do. NOT LIKE Web Sites That Have In That "?", "=" in lines. this index. if a lot of pages to index. if a lot of pages to indicates Has to Be Careful That there is not a unlimited Number of Pages To Index That Can Be Generated by a Dynamic Site. The Best Type of Url's To Use Would Be: http://www.payless-batteries.com/product.html/ Name / Laptop_Battery / Brand / IBM / Model / ThinkPad_345c / You Can do this USING A MOD-REWRITE IN APACHE. I Guarantee this Modification Will Increase Search Engine Ranking.
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Linking We should link all the page rank 5 and 4 sites together on the front of the page and use the "class = hidden" attribute stop customers seeing them to. Then we can create a link page for our sites that will not be on the Front Page and Also Search Down Web Sites with High Pr Value. Note!
We can not have pages with more than 100 links on. If we need to add more we should create more link pages to add other sites too. Linking is very important and there should be a team that can hunt down high PR links.Back To TOP