problems, as well as providing data on search engine indexing and search traffic. If you sign up for this tool, Google will also send you messages if it finds issues with your current site. To create an account, visit www.google.com/webmasters.
• Sitemap.xml: A sitemap is a file that lists all the pages that you want the search engines to crawl; it’s like a glossary for Google. Generate a sitemap.xml and upload it to the root directory of your server. Then submit it to Google Webmaster Central.
• Site speed: Ensure that your site loads quickly. There are many free tools that can be found online to test loading time. Use them to compare your site to the top sites on the first page of Google. If your site loads slower than your competitors’, ask your website developer or programmer to take steps to improve your speed: clean the code your site was written in, reference java script codes, and reduce the size of large images, just to name a few examples. You can also have your programmer check various advanced server issues. However, sharing a server with other websites or webhosts can sometimes cause problems that you might not necessarily be aware of but which slow down your site.
• Google Analytics: This tool tracks how visitors are getting to your site and generates advanced traffic reports. To create an account, visit http://www.google.com/analytics.
• 404 page error: A 404 page is a custom error page that appears whenever a visitor accidentally arrives on a page of your site that no longer exists or, in some cases, never existed. For example, let’s say a visitor was trying to get to your services page, and misspelled the exact URL. A 404 page should come up to help them. This makes for a better user experience, which search engines value. Also, search engines like knowing which pages exist and which don’t. Your 404 page should be customized to contain a message to the user telling him or her that the page was not found, plus a call to action to continue browsing your site, such as alternative pages to visit.
• 301 Redirect: Google treats http://Domain-Name.com and http://www.Domain-Name.com as two different sites. This means your website’s SEO is penalized. To avoid this, create a 301 redirect from Domain-Name.com to www.Domain-Name.com. If you currently have an .htaccess file on the root, simply add the following code to it:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^Domain-Name.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.Domain-Name.com/$1 [L,R=301]
(Just make sure your website does in fact redirect to the www.Domain-Name.com after updating the .htaccess page.)
• 301 Permanent Redirect: If you are redeveloping a website, your pages may end up with new URLs. A 301 permanent redirect ensures the search engines know that your old pages have moved to a new location. If you don’t do this, your site may lose the SEO value that your old pages acquired over the years.
• Robots.txt: Your site may include data you do not want to be searchable. To ensure that search engines do not crawl and index sensitive information, use a robots.txt file, which tells search engines not to crawl specific areas of your website. You can add the robots.txt file to the Google Webmaster tool.
• Broken Links: Search engines don’t like when sites link to pages that have been deleted or moved. Ensure that there are no links like this on your site by checking Google Webmaster Central.
• URL naming: Use your keywords to create pages dedicated to their target audience. Taking our example for the Fundraising site, you will need to name and create pages using these keywords. For example, if we have a page about fundraising ideas for schools, name your page school-fundraising-ideas.html. Remember that search engines are looking for keywords, content, and relevancy to any given unique search query.
• Image naming: Naming images is basically the same as URL naming. You want to name your images using the same technique. For example, if you have a page about fundraising for schools, create an image with a fun illustration of kids in school and name your file fundraiser-ideas-for-school.jpg.
On-Page Factors
On-page SEO factors are a crucial part to your site’s overall SEO success; they are still an integral part of the algorithm Google and other search engines use to rank your page. On-page elements refer to the HTML tags within a site’s coding—HTML is a coding language used to write webpages—and they can be tweaked to make your website more appealing to search engines.
Though other elements like sitemaps and redirects are important, it’s best to concentrate on some of the major on-page factors in order to ensure that your webpages are optimized and can rank higher with search engines.
Title: The <title> tag defines the title of the page or document online—the way search engines reference your page on their search engine result pages. It’s also a great opportunity to provide search engines with information about the page you are trying to optimize.
For example, go to Google.com and type in the following keywords: fundraising ideas. You will see the following results:
Here’s the Title tag of the first result:
<title>Do-It-Yourself Fundraising Ideas – DIY Fundraiser</title>
As you can see, the title contains its site’s most relevant and important keywords: Fundraising Ideas and DIY Fundraiser. These sites are optimized for the search phrase “Fundraising ideas” because the keywords appear in the title, among other factors.
Each page of your site should have a unique title that uses three to five keyword phrases and is less than sixty-five characters long. Any characters following the sixtieth one will be ignored. You should avoid “stop words” between important keywords such as and, or, with, for. You have limited space to write a title and you want to use as many of your main keywords as possible. Dashes are one good way to separate keywords, but do not overuse them. This can be viewed as keyword stuffing (a big no-no) by the search engines. You can use commas, pipe bars, and sentences that make sense to humans, too.
Meta description: The description tag describes, in a couple of sentences, what a page is about. For example:
The HTML code that generated that second result:
<meta name=“description” content=“Fundraising Ideas can be easy. We help more than 10,000 groups every year choose the best fundraisers for their needs. Let us help you choose the right fundraiser.” />
When writing a meta description, ensure it is no more than 150 characters in length. Write a unique meta description for each page and the main keywords you are optimizing your page for.
Headings:
