Why SEO and RANK

A. Why SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and RANK:

a. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of optimizing a website in order for it to rank better in Google and other search engines.

b. The tool of choice to solving our unanswered questions, finding a product or service is done through the help of an internet search engine like Google. Nearly 250 million searches are performed per day on Google alone. This number is trending upwards since the introduction of 3G or higher wireless networks, providing fast mobile web browsing with the smart phones and laptop with wireless sticks.

c. One thing you can do to help is by creating URLs that contain useful information. Google will usually rank a site higher with a URL like http://www.xyzwebsite.com/product/abcd compared to http://www.xyzwebsite.com/productdetails.aspx?prod=abcd. In addition to being ranked higher by search engines, it is a lot easier for humans to remember as well.

B. This is the action plan to implement SEO:

            a. Create a SEO friendly “Slug” to optimize the URL

            b. Add keywords and <meta> properties to all our pages

            c. Specify a canonical URL for all content

            d. Use schema.org or RDFa micro formats to optimize display of search results

            e. Create a robots.txt

            f. Create a sitemap.xml

            g. Use Google Webmaster Tools to check the results

C. Plans to improve SEO:

1. Missing Title Tags ⇒ The title is missing in the head section of the page

Search engines use the title of a page to help decide what the page is about, so an easy way to

improve your SEO is to make sure all of your important pages have unique and descriptive titles. Unique, descriptive titles on each of your important pages will increase the likelihood that search engines will show your pages in search results.

Additionally, search engines often display a page's title in search results. If your titles are missing, search engines will either guess at the text to show or worse not show a title at all. If your important pages have titles that are clear and descriptive, people will be better able to understand what your site is about and will be more likely to click on your links instead of the other links shown.

2. Multiple Title Tags ⇒ The page contains multiple titles

Search engines use the title of a page to help decide what the page is about, so an easy way to

improve your SEO is to make sure all of your important pages have unique and descriptive titles. Unique, descriptive titles on each of your important pages will increase the likelihood that search engines will show your pages in search results.

Additionally, search engines often display a page's title in search results. If your titles are clear and descriptive, people will be better able to understand what your site is about and will be more likely to click on your links instead of the other links shown.

3. Long Title Tags ⇒ The title is too short or too long

Search engines displays page titles in search results, but if your page title is too long it will be truncated. Unique, descriptive titles on each of your important pages will increase the likelihood that search engines will show your pages in search results.

4. Duplicate Title Tags ⇒ There are duplicate title in your website

Search engines use the title of a page to help decide what the page is about, so an easy way to

improve your SEO is to make sure all of your important pages have unique and descriptive titles. Unique, descriptive titles on each of your important pages will increase the likelihood that search engines will show your pages in search results.

Additionally, search engines often display a page's title in search results. If your titles are clear and descriptive, people will be better able to understand what your site is about and will be more likely to click on your links instead of the other links shown.

<title>This is the page title</title>

5. The <h1> tag is missing.

The <h1> tag is an indicator to Bingbot and web visitors of what the body copy's primary theme or topic is.  The <h1> tag reinforces the core keyword(s)  found in the title, description, and the body copy. We recommend that the <h1> tag includes keywords that reflect the contents of the page and that it is not longer than approximately 150 characters in length.

Add a header to the page by using a <h1> tag and place it within the <body> of the page source. Example: <h1>A precise and descriptive headline for the page</h1>.

6. There are multiple <h1> tags on the page.

Remove redundant <h1> tags from the page source, so that only one <h1> tag exists.

7. The description is missing in the head section of the page.

Search engines may use the description provided in the <description> tag. A well-written description that pertains to the content of the page and that is relevant to the searcher's intent can help you increase traffic since it can help improve the click-through rate of your page in search.

Add a description to the <head> section of the page source: <meta name="description" content="Descriptive, keyword-rich text that talks about the page content goes here.">.

8. Duplicate Meta Descriptions ⇒ There are multiple descriptions on the page

Duplicate meta descriptions for multiple URLs on your website can reduce traffic from search engines. Because meta descriptions are often used in the context snippets that appear in search results, duplicate or vague descriptions in your HTML headers may lead to low click-throughs to your site. This may, in turn, diminish your ranking in search results.

Search engines may use the meta descriptions in the HTML headers of your pages to better index

search results. Because duplicate meta descriptions can lead to improper indexing of your site's pages, it is important to differentiate between the content of each unique URL by accurately describing the page content in the meta description.

9. The description is too long or too short

Search engine crawlers only show the first 150-160 characters of the description in the search results page, so if a description is too long, searchers may not see all of the text. If a description is too short, the search engines may add text found elsewhere on the page. Note that search engines may show a different description from the one you have authored if they feel it may be more relevant to a user's search. Change the description in the <meta description> tag in the page source to be between 25 and 160 characters in length.

10. The <img> tag does not have an ALT attribute defined

As a general rule, search engines do not interpret the content of image files. The text provided in the <img alt> attribute enables the site owner to provide relevant information to the search engine and to the end user. Alt text is helpful to end users if they have images disabled or if the image does not properly load. In addition, the Alt text is utilized by screen readers. Make sure that your Alt text is descriptive and accurately reflects what the image represents and supports the content on the page.

Use the <img alt> attribute to write descriptive content for the image: <img source="pic.gif" alt="Accurate and descriptive keyword text that represents the image."</img>.

11. Hostname

Many websites allow for users to visit them through both http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com.

Most search engines treat these as separate hosts, so it is important to have one redirect to the other or you risk splitting your Page Rank across the two versions of your site.

12. Reachability

A well structured, well linked site makes it easy for your visitors and for search engine crawlers to find what they are looking for. Deeply nested pages or, worse, those with no links at all may be evaluated as unimportant by search engines.

13. Redirects

Redirecting too many of your sites pages to other pages wastes crawler resources and may result in a smaller number of pages being crawled.

14. Anchor Text

Search engines use anchor text to help decide what the page linked to is about. So every link on your site should have descriptive, keyword rich anchor text that describes the destination page.

15. Broken Links

A broken link on your website undermines the user experience, wastes the resources of search engine crawlers, and can affect your placement in search engines.

16. Dead End Pages

Dead end pages — pages with no links on them — require a visitor to click the back button in order to stay on your website. You should make it as easy as possible for visitors to stay on your site.

17. Page Not Found

A good 'Page Not Found' error page lets your visitors know that the page does not exist, navigates them back into your site, and helps them find what they were looking for. A good error page also lets search engine crawlers know that the page does not exist so they can avoid indexing it's content and potentially sending traffic to a non-existent page. It is very important that the 'Page Not Found' error page returns a '404' error so that search engine crawlers can recognize it as an error page. The error code and html displayed when a non-existent page is requested can be configured in your web server

18. Long URLs

Most search engines display URLs in search results. If an URL is too long, people doing searches will see a truncated version and you might miss an opportunity to get them to click. In addition, shorter URLs are easier for users to share on social services such as Twitter and Facebook.

19. Duplicate Content

Duplicate content across different URLs on your website leads to poor placement in search results.

Search engine crawlers follow links, capture content, and attempt to index all known URLs on your site. When multiple URLs serve the same page, search engines waste resources collecting and processing identical content. They may also penalize placement of your pages in search results. Common types of duplicate pages are printable or text-only versions of the main page, or redirects to login pages intended for your site's visitors that also return a "You must log in" page to crawlers.

20. Too Many Links

Putting too many links on a given page may negatively impact how search engines assess the quality of the page, and can make your site harder to navigate.

21. Server Errors

Server errors indicate major problems with the content of your site.

22. Robots.txt

A robots.txt file can be used to restrict access by crawlers to your entire website or to areas of your website. Properly used, the robots.txt file prevents search engines from indexing contact forms, duplicate content, and other pages of your site that shouldn't be indexed. However, a mis-configured robots.txt file can prevent search engines from indexing valuable content. If you are not familiar with ways to use a robots.txt file to your advantage, you can find information about this tool on Wikipedia or The Web Robots Pages.

23. Session IDs

Search engine crawlers may have trouble understanding session ID parameters in URLs. As a result, sites which use session ID URL parameters may suffer from a lower ranking in search results.

24. On-Site Links

Search engines include the link structure of your site among their criteria for determining

which pages on your site are most important.

25. Low Word Count

Pages with little or no text content often receive poor placement in search results.

26. Image Descriptions

Including descriptions for the images on your pages can assist search engines with indexing your site's non-text content.

27. The page is missing meta language information

The Meta Language information is used as a hint to help us understand the intended language and country/region the page content applies to. This can help if your site is not hosted in the country/region. Use the “content-language” meta tag to embed the culture code in the <head> section of your page. For example, <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-gb"> indicates that the page is in English and intended for the the United Kingdom. Alternatively, you can use <html lang="en-gb"> or <title lang="en-gb">.

Use <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="ll-cc"> tag in the <head> section of your page, where "ll-cc" stands for the culture code of the language and country/region the content applies to. Alternatively use the lang="ll-cc" attribute on either the <html> or the <title> tag .

28. Evaluated size of HTML is estimated to be over 125 KB and risks not being fully cached.

Search engines may not fully acquire the content on a page if the page is contains a lot of code. Extraneous code can push the content down in the page source making it harder for a search engine crawler to get to.  A soft limit of 125 KB is used for guidance to ensure all content & links are available in the page source to be cached by the crawler. This basically means if the page size is too big, a search engine may not be able to get all of the content or may end up not fully caching it.

Ensure that the page source does not contain large amounts of CSS or code at the top of the page. Consider moving code and styles into separate files.