Fairfield County's Search Engine Optimization Blog: How to Increase Website Performance and Page Rank Pt.2

These SEO/ Internet Marketing Tips is continued from How to Increase Website Performance and Page Rank Pt.1  

 Improve your web site page titles

Titles are a critical factor in improving your website’s page ranking.  Think of the manner in which a book is laid out, if the book didn’t have titles for the articles, then no one would read the articles or even know what the content of the articles is. So think of the page title as the chapter in a book. These titles help the search engines identify appropriate pages to deliver to the search engine user. If you don’t have a title page that includes pertinent information for the search then your page may not be shown to the user. Your page title should help the search engines identify your content and it should clearly be related to the content. You may put your business name in the title, but my suggestion is that you put it after your key phrases and descriptive information.

Improve your website page names

To improve your page names, you first need to establish what the page has for a focus. The content and title should clearly point out this to you. Now, review the page name in address bar of your web browser. Is the page name similar to the content? Does it give you a sense as to how close the content will be to the subject of the page? A page name of abc.html is not nearly as good as healthy‐food‐for‐your‐pet.html if your content is related to the type of exercise your dog gets, or other tips you might give related to the health of your dog. Abc.html should be modified. To do this, on most sites, you simply copy the page, paste it again, and rename the file. Then you upload the new page to your site. Now you need to link the new page from all the other pages that point to abc.html. One point I want to make and be clear on, do not remove the abc.html file. You may be getting rankings and traffic from search engines sending users to this page. You should eventually remove it but you first need to redirect the traffic going to the abc.html page to the newly named page. To do this you need to utilize something called a 301 redirect. This will direct the search engines to update their page from abc.html to the newly named page. Once you do the 301 redirect, you can remove abc.html. All of this can be a daunting task which is why we recommend an easy to use content management system.

Define where your website ranks

You need to understand where your website ranks and for what key phrases it does well for. Once you have identified what you want to show up for, start running ranking reports. Veritage Marketing Group’s SEO competitive analysis report can accomplish this for you a low cost. Let me say something about analytics and how important it is. You cannot manage what you can’t measure and you certainly cannot monetize it either. So always begin with defining where you rank now and begin setting milestones in performance. You can do this yourself if you have time, with Google analytics. Simply type in the key phrase into the search engine and start going through the pages. On Google you want to look for your domain in the “green” text under the description and link. Keep moving through the page results until you find something. This could take a while. Once you get through 10 pages, and then try another key phrase. If you are ranking above 100, then just mark 100 for the ranking result on a spreadsheet. Use this spreadsheet to track your results for all the key phrases. This will create a baseline to show you if things are improving over time.

Research what you want to show up for

In order for you to improve results on your site you need to determine what you want to show up for. One great way to do this is to review your competitor’s website, and view their major topic points. In addition you can view their Meta keywords which are sometimes a good indicator for what they want to show up for. To do this, go to their site, then click on view in the menu bar of the web browser, choose source and it will open a file in notepad. Look in the top 10 lines of the code for Meta keywords, here you should find what they want to show up for. This is good information but now you need to start finding out what your prospects are searching for. It does you no good to want to show up for something that no one is searching for. Go to wordtracker they offer a free trial and you can follow their trial instructions and find out some great details. Word Tracker can be expensive for the small business, but if you use the trial during the trial period, you can get a great deal of keyword and key phrase information out of it.

In part three of : "How to increase website performance and page rank" I will discuss forms, defining your competition and links. Feel free to leave any questions or comments below.