Search Engine Optimization

From Altervista Wiki
Jump to: navigation, search

Your site is already online? It's time to make a little bit of optimization to allow other people to reach it through search engines as Google or Bing. The base Search Engine Optimization suggestions are easy to follow and will not take you a lot of time.

First of all: let search engines find your site!

Before people can find your site using a search engine the search engine has to find you! Google and friends navigate through the web searching new pages to be added to them indexes and it sometime requires days or weeks before they find your newly created site. It will much easier if your report your site to them!

How do I report my website to Google?

Report an URL

Just follow this link to get started. You will require a Google account to report your site, but probably you have already one.

It's not necessary to enter all the pages, but only the main page. Google will find the others.

Send a Sitemap

In addition to sending your main page's URL, you can also send a sitemap. A sitemap is a web page that lists hierarchically all the pages contained within a web space. To create a sitemap, you can use the Sitemap tool from your AlterVista control panel. You can use the generated sitemap also with Bing and Ask search engines.

Why is my site not yet visible on the search engines?

There may be several reasons, but the most common is that the search engine's web spiders have not yet visited your pages. Sometime the process takes weeks.

Can I speed up indexing?

The answer is yes, but it is not so easy. The tip is to have your site linked from other websites with high pagerank.

But attention, Google knows how to recognize spam and hates that! So don't simply spam your link on message boards or other public places on the web.

If you want to do things in the right way you have to focus on your site's content. If you have high-quality content other people will put links to your pages on other sites, forums and blogs by them selfs. This is the good way to obtain backlinks.

Optimizing the content for search engines

Ok, now we are waiting that your pages are indexes by search engines. We can now focus on optimizing the content to get a good position on the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) when users search for keywords we want to match.

Title, content and meta-tags

Every page have some information that is outside the content, but that is very important for search engines.

Title

The title should be inserted into the <title></title> and should not exceed 80 characters and reflect the content.

So if our post is talking about apples, bananas and melons let this keywords to be present in the page title!

Content

The main rule: the content must be original and NOT copied. Google penalizes sites that have the same content as others. So write something original and interesting for other people!

Meta-tags

In addition to having a good title and a good content on a page it's also a good idea to set a description and keywords using meta-tags.

The meta tags are placed within the <head></head> and have this syntax:

<meta name="description" content="Write here the page description"/>
<meta name="keywords" content="first key, second key, third key, fourth key, key fifth, sixth key"/>

The description must not exceed 200 characters and must summarize in a few words the content of the page, just like the title, but a little bit longer.

The keywords must be not more than 5 or 6. A lot of people says that search engines doesn't make any more use of keywords, so they are probably not of that importance.

Keyword density

Experts define keyword density as percentage of keywords contained within a page (title and meta tags included).

Keywords should be placed inside in the title and meta description tag, but also in
<h1></h1>, <h2></h2> ...
tags! The
<strong></strong>
can be also used to say to search engines which keywords are important in your content. This way you increase your keyword density.

Keyword stuffing

But "more" does not always means "better". Search engines don't like to see pages with keywords everywhere and only a short normal text. This practice is called keyword stuffing.

When you write a post remember that you are working to say something interesting to someone else and not for the search engines. Just pay attention to put the keywords in the right places: titles, description and obviously in the text.

Any other questions? Feel free to ask anything on our support forum.