The SE Optimizer NewsletterIn this issue:
Dowloading your Free Web Master Tools Optimizing an existing page/s - the first steps Using CSS to optimize your web pages
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Optimizing an existing page/s - the first steps
Let's assume the worst and you have an existing web site and you want to improve your search engine ranking.
You need to answer a few questions: - How much of your site can you change or want to change?
- What keyword's are people using to find your site?
- On what search engine/s do you want to improve your ranking?
- What's your current ranking on these search engine's?
They might seem like obvious questions to ask, but you'd be surprised how many site owners don't know the answers. If you do that's great, if not you need to find out. - Perhaps you're limited by page design as to what you can easily change without doing a lot of work. Choose to optimize the page/s in areas that involve you in the least work. That means first make changes to the page title, headlines (h1,h2), the body text and the Alt tags to include your keyword phrase as close to the beginning of the title/headline/body text as possible.
Next change your link text to include your keyword phrase.
Next change the file name of the link URL to include your keyword phrase.
- If your page/s not properly optimized visitors may find them by keyword's you had not planned for. The first place to look, the site web statistics, assuming your web host provides them.
If they don't provide stats or the ones you get don't tell you what keyword's are being used to reach your pages contact your host and see if they will let you access the raw log files. All web servers have them, but not all hosts will let you access them.
Download the log files using your ftp client and put them into a web stats analyzer, something like Conversion Track will do the job. You may be surprised to find people are finding your site through search terms you had not expected.
Do you want to be found for these terms ?
These may not be the visitors you want, most of them could be untargeted traffic.
Go back and do some keyword research to see if there are better keyword's with less competition but still enough traffic. Use some of the keyword generator and analyzer tools to do most of the work for you,
see A keyword generator & analyzer - Which ones to use
If the keyword phrase/s are what you want pages to be found by, check and analyze your ranking on the search engine. You could use something like the reporter option in Web Position Gold.
Analyze your page/s for keyword density, use a tool like the GRKda and optimize the page for the keyword phrase/s you want to be found for. You have to edit the content of the page to get your keyword's into all areas of the page analyzed by GRKda if you can.
- Don't try to optimize for too many search engine's, choose one to start with and concentrate on that and leave the others. If you optimize for one, you will improve on the others as well by default, especially if you're well down the rankings.
Have you chosen the best keyword phrases? If there's too much competition you have to do a lot more optimization work. If you must use those keyword's & phrases you might be able to reduce the competition by choosing another search engine to optimize your pages/s for?
Do a query on the main search engine's using your keyword phrase/s to see how many pages are found for that term. Use an exact match query, normally under the advanced search option.
Try choosing a search engine you find with fewer competing pages and optimize your page/s for that search engine using a page analyzer like SEO Optimizer or Web Position Gold 2. These will give you tips on what you need to do for the specific search engine you choose.
- Check and record your current ranking for the keyword phrase/s you want on the search engine you have chosen.
You can do that through the Web Position Gold Reporter. Resubmit your page/s to the search engine (you can use the submitter in WPG) if the search engine allows it, or you just have to wait until your pages get visited again by the search engine spider.
Monitor your web stats or log files to see when the spider has called, then give it a few days and recheck the ranking.
If still the same, leave it a bit longer and recheck.
Tip: Make enough changes to the page file size that the spider recognizes the page has changed and re-indexes it.
Add more content, you need to change the file size by 1-2KB.
Using CSS to optimize your web pages
One of the advantages of Cascading Style Sheets or CSS for the optimizer is the ability to control the look of a single page or many pages using code that's external to the page/s. There are three advantages to this. - You can control the size of header text and be able to use h1, h2 tags defined to any text size you want and not the enormous default text size set by the html for these tags.
- Extensive use of CSS makes your pages more search engine spider friendly, because there is less code on the page it has to dig through to get what it's interested in.
- It means the page loads faster for your human visitors.
Use h1 and h2 tags on your page for the title headers in your content. H1 for the main visible page title and h2 for sub-headings, Use only one h1 per page.
<h1>This is a non CSS h1 heading</h1> This is a non CSS h1 heading
<h2>This is a non CSS h2 heading</h2> This is a non CSS h2 heading
As you can see these headings are not very practical to use. However the search engine spider determines how important your headers are by the h tag; h1 means very important, h6 means least important.
Below is the CSS code for H1 and H2 tags. By changing the various parameters you can set the font type, size, line height and color of the displayed text. The reason for the three font types is that if one is not available on the users PC it defaults to the next. The first font type is the default type for windows, the second for a MAC PC.
The brackets around the code are not normal ( ) although they may look like it, they are curly brace brackets { }
H1 { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; line-height: 75%; color: #0033FF; }
H2 { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 50%; color: #000000; }
This is what the heading would look like on the page :
<h1>This is a CSS h1 heading</h1> This is CSS h1 heading
<h2>This is a CSS h2 heading</h2> This is a CSS h2 heading
Changing the line-height % allows you to control the spacing from text around the heading.
You can also define code for h3, h4, h5 and h6 tags if you need to.
Copy the code into notepad and save it with the file extension css. For example you could call it optimizer.css and save it to the root directory where you have your web page files.
Next between the <head></head> tags of your page add the following code:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="optimizer.css" type="text/css">
If you want to use the same header code for other pages you just need to add the link rel code to the page.
Look how much better the titles look, so now you have the best of all worlds, able to use the header tags the spider will look for and able to control them on every web page with a simple CSS file. |
