Search engine optimization requires an integrated approach wherein every little thing that is connected however remotely with optimization should be a part of the SEO strategy. It is only a cohesive effort that can help you boost your SEO efforts and ensure it has a decisive impact on your rankings.
Its also important to understand that your SEO strategy shouldnt try and do something that is radically different. More often than not, you are best served by getting the essentials right and just sitting back and allowing them to take their own course.
In our previous post we discussed 4 essentials namely broken links, page load time, JavaScript in SEO and avoiding doorway pages. Now we come to the last part of this post and cover the remaining SEO essentials that need to be considered during the process of website building.
Striking Graphics
I am sure you have gone hmmm and are wondering how graphics are going to improve your rankings on SERPs. Well, think about it. What is it that you want your website to do? It needs to create an impression in the minds of your website visitors. It needs to catch their attention so that a combination of great content and visuals ensures that they spend more time on your site.
And what about the image SEO perspective well, just place a keyword in the ALT tag of the image and hyperlink the same keyword to your target page will help you get a link on that keyword. So, having great graphics works both ways.
Tableless Design (Div Based)
You can either use HTML tables to control your page layout or use a DIV based design for page layout control. The former is a tableless approach to designing web pages made possible through the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Its increasingly being seen that DIV based layouts are friendlier with respect to search engines. What it helps designers do is that all the definitions related to the layout are kept separate, meaning both content and layout are separate. The main file therefore is light and can be easily indexed by search engines bots.
Google Analytics Code Placement
If you want to track the performance of your site right, from the number of visitors to the amount of conversions and everything in between, you need to place Google Analytics code in your web page. The placement of this code is very important. Google now has started to provide a highly advanced tracking code and it is recommended that this code is placed before the closing tag of the head section, right before </head>
Why? The reason is very simple - place it before the head and you will be able to track each and every visit. ; place it in the body, and you only are able to track those visits, in which the page has completely loaded.
I’ve always been of the opinion that SEO is a combination of all the ‘best practices’, or as you said, an integrated approach of large and small things.
Just wanted to say kudos for this series of posts. Hadn’t read the earlier ones, but just did. Excellent stuff, all of which is easily do-able I feel. Probably one of the more useful posts I’ve come across in a while!