SEM/SEO

SEO Factors You Have Control Of

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  • April 30, 2009

SEO industry is very much dependent on the ever changing search engine algos. There are a lot of factors in the game that are completely out of reach and control of website promoters. But there are also quite a number of things you can do right away to improve your website’s SEO standing and gain some leverage in the search engine listings. These are the pieces of the ranking puzzle that you fully control mainly because they are on your table (read website).

Content

Content is the beef of your website and the major source of ranking opportunities. If you have little or no content on your web pages there are few keywords they can get good rankings for. Of course you shouldn’t add more content just for sake of stuffing in more keywords, but there’re always dozens of opportunities to add more value for your visitors while tapping into new traffic-heavy keywords you have a good chance to rank high for.

You can find a lot of tips on keyword research and ways to select the best keywords in this SEO book.

Navigation and Inner Linking Structure

The navigation structure of your website carries double importance. First, it shapes the experience of your visitors. How quickly and easily they get to the information they seek pretty much determines whether they will want to come back.

Second, navigation is a significant issue for search engine crawlers. The way your web pages are interlinked helps search engines understand the architecture of your website. If you have too few internal links, important pages may not get into the search engine index. If there are too many links, the weight of the more significant pages maybe reduced in favor of secondary ones.

Having a well structured navigation will not only increase your search engine rankings, but will also make your website more appealing to the visitors.

Duplicate WebPages

If you have several webpages with the same content but different URLs you may be loosing some of your rankings because of the duplicate content issue. This problem is typical of e-shops with lots of items placed in multiple categories which can be accessed differently through tree-like navigation structure. As a result one and the same product page can be reached in a variety of ways and will have a dozen of different URLs. When search engine spiders find duplicate pages they either leave it unindexed, or only include one of the pages in the search results, and it may be not the one you would like to see there. The issue can be resolved with the help of a robots.txt file.

Title Tags

Title tag is the single most important element on a webpage. Properly optimized title can give a significant boost to your search engine rankings. However, quite often webmasters will just copy and paste the same (often unoptimized) title into dozens of webpages, throwing part of their ranking potential out the window. Check your title tags and see how you can improve them to include your targeted keywords.

These are some of the SEO factors that are fully under your control. You can check these critical areas of your website right now and see how you can improve them. Hope this will help you achieve your SEO goals.

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