Last week I introduced the idea of SEO or search engine optimization. This week I’ll be sharing some examples of things I have learned in the world of SEO. I promise to keep it simple and not talk over anyone’s head. SEO can get pretty technical, but everything I discuss here I’ve used myself. If you want to get detailed technical help you should contact a company that provides that service. At the end of this series of SEO tips and tricks, I will provide information about some companies and organizations that provide this type of work. If you are a SEO professional, please use the comments here in these posts to expand on the thinking and provide your own additions to the tips provided.
In this day and age of online marketing many companies have some very dynamic websites that show off their company, their mission and their message. A lot of those companies have paid a king’s ransom to have their sites professionally designed by experts and that certainly shows. I know that many of them are proud of the look an feel of the website and how it looks from a user perspective, but how does it work from an SEO standpoint? For some of them, not very well. Here are my first three tips to make your website operate better.
Don’t Use Flash
Some websites work on Flash or have elaborate flash movement on their sites or things like animation and movies. This looks and feels very professional and gives the user a cool experience. The problem is search engines do not recognize how cool a website looks from the standpoint of the flash work that has been integrated. The site looks like a million bucks but operates at about $9.95. I don’t suggest that you integrate flash from a search perspective. Blog templates tend not to use flash as part of their design features so you may not have that problem.
Optimize and Fix Broken Links
I love to surf the web and read about companies and what they do. I don’t like to have to wait for a site to spend a long time loading and I want to read the information and go on to the next site. Make sure your site loads quickly and has no broken links. Search engines don’t like broken links either, and they don’t spend the time when they crawl your site to fix them for you. There are some tools out there like W3C Link Checker that can tell you when links on your site are broken or not operating correctly. Search engines love to crawl links but not if they are not working properly.
Make Your Site Left To Right
As content readers here in the United States and most of the English speaking world, we read from left to right. It is optimal for search engines as well to index or crawl your site the same way. They like to work from left to right. The way we read a site is the same way they read a site. They start with the title at the top, or the header, and then with what is contained on the left side of the site and move to the right. This is especially important when choosing a template for your blog. I always like to tell people to showcase your blog content on the left side of the site with the sidebars or category information on the right. This allows the most important part of your site, the content, or your companies mission and message to be indexed first by the search engines.
These are just three tips that are very general but very good ways to get started if you are thinking about optimizing your site for the search engines. My next tips for the SEO friendly website or blog is how to find and use keywords in your site or in your content.
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Tags: Blog Design, Business Websites, nonprofit blogging, search engine optimization, SEO, social media, Website Design
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