SEO for the Layperson

The knowledge an SEO beholds is priceless to an online business. The logistics of search engines constantly change and involves many factors. If the process were easy enough, there would not have to be an industry devoted to it. SEO services understand their knowledge is useful and coveted, but the masses need to understand some of the basics to realize the need for an SEO.

The following article provides information on areas pertinent to the success of a Web site.

Create/update robots.txt and sitemap files

These tools enable search engines to crawl your site’s content and avoid the sections that are of less importance or pose problems to the process. Proper use of these tools makes a huge difference in an engine indexing your pages or undergoing a complete crawl failure.

Search engine crawl error pages

Be vigilante in monitoring crawl error reports to learn how your site and pages are performing. Looking at the error report elucidates why crawlers have trouble indexing your content. Finding a solution becomes easier through monitoring the report.

Check bot activity reports

The reports indicate how long it takes a bot to access your pages. It offers insight into the speed of your network and state of your Web server. Bots experience downtimes, but if it is an ongoing issue, it needs to be fixed. Browsers can be very impatient and making them wait for pages to load can be detrimental to your generation of revenue.

Navigation as HTML

Do not use images for site navigation; it will render your site navigation valueless for engine crawlers. Sites can attain similar effects with CSS roll-overs that maintain the aesthetic impact, and still provide useful and pertinent link text to engines.

Images have ALT text

Instituting ALT text provides another opportunity to optimize your pages. ALT text is important for vision-impaired usability and for search engines to recognize the text in association with your images.

Flash content

Limit the amount of Flash attributes on your site. Flash can take away from other aspects of the page in reference to user content and conversion links.

Page tags and descriptions

Each page needs a unique title and meta description tag. Inserting keywords into page titles and meta tags is vital. Doing this greatly improves the visibility of your site in organic search results in reference to keywords used.

Page elements as HTML

The most important elements on your pages should be comprised in clean, standards-compliant, and optimized HTML source code.

Use keywords in content

Target keywords need to be implemented in page content. Without relevant content, your keywords will not be represented in search results. The ideal situation is writing riveting content including your keywords without sounding redundant.

404 error codes

Be vigilante in fixing broken links. Crawlers may not spend the time indexing the rest of your site if they come across broken links.