Starting With Web-Site Optimization - Hosting, Domain Names, Navigation, Sitemaps

Web-site optimization is creating a website that will be discovered by search engines and of course search

directories. Not all the aspects of correct optimization are keywords, links, meta tags. There are much more elements to optimize for successful optimization.

I would say it does not matter who you choose to be your host, but important factor is where your domain host is.

For example if your domain host is in England and you have a website for American population, your rankings may suffer.

Search engines will be confused with the domain host location, so always be careful to choose the host where your target population is.

Another important factor is how long is domain registered. Usually spammers and hackers purchase domain for 1 year and in the period of time, that domain s usually removed from search engine index, and their site is shut down. So search engines give more priority to domains that are registered for longer time. A domain that was bought and used for over 10 years, have much better ranking chance than the new domain bought 1 month ago.

Usually people choose their domain related to their business or their name. So the question is, will the name affect the site SEO?

Big company with a lot of money strive to have the best domain. For example casino.com, Business.com, Health.com were the domains sold for few million dollars.

So why are these companies paying so much for the domains. When you search for a term or keyword, usually you can find the site witht the same term in the domain in top 5 results.

For example searching for SEO AND WEB DESIGN will result in displaying my site seoandwebdesign.com.

So If you can, and if the domain is available, try to purchase domain that has the same keyword that you want your site to rank for. The major domain with popular keywords are all taken, so try your luck.

So if you are selling Spanish Herbs, try to register your domain as spanishherbs.com.

Using a domain name containing a keyword from your content usually improves your site ranking.

Few more tips on buying a domain:

Purchase the domain name as short as possible. Too many words or characters will result in more misspellings, people might have problem remembering your name.

Don’t use dashes in the domain name, underscores and other characters. If the domain you want to register is taken, don’t just add some meaningless character of a number. Try to find another word that is relevant and has one or more of the keywords you will be optimizing your site for.

Choose the .com domain, there are many domains to choose for like info, biz, us, tv, names, jobs, eur, ca, de. The .com domain is always the best choice.

The .com are the best domain to choose, because they are easily memorable and they achive better ranking than other domain. For example duty.com will achive better ranking than duty.info, of course if the other factors are the same (links, meta tags, onsite optimization……..).

But if you can not fid the wanted and optimal domain, still the optimal optimization will prevail. The domain is not the most important factor of the website. Remember that.

Website Usability is another crucial aspect. It is also one of the top user’s requirements.

When users come to your site from search results, they want to find the what they’re looking for, to navigate from place to place, and to be able to load pages quickly, without any difficulties.

Web users are very impatient. They don’t like to search long, or wait for a page to open up.

So usability means how thee user navigates through and uses your web site. And yes, usability has a great impact on SEO.

Usability si very important also for search bots. When a bot comes and crawls your site it check all the page elements, links, meta tags, html code, links. And sometimes some websites are poorly build with messed up code. And a search bot just give up, Because of the frame, flash, it can not read the site html code. It can not find other pages of your websites, because of the false coding.

So that is a huge loss for you rankings.

Web-site navigation consists of internal navigation and external navigation. Internal navigation includes the internal links that move users from one page to another on your site. External navigation includes links that point to external sites. For your navigation to be SEO-friendly, you have to use both types of navigation carefully.

Check the populat competition sites. How is those sites navigation structured? Most of those sites use the simple top or left side navigation. They use usually simple text, or button navigation design.

The navigation for most of the sites looks the same, because it works. Having a text-based navigation on the left side works perfectly for SEO, because you can use anchor tags filled with appropriate keywords, that you target on through the site.

It allows crawlers to move from one page to another with ease. Buttons are the second best option to use for navigation. They are harder for crawlers to navigate, and depending on the code in which those buttons are designed, they might be completely invisible to the search engine bots, especially if you use java script or flash based buttons. Of the site has button based navigation system on the top, they also have a simple text based navigation at the bottom of the page. The crawler can still move from page to page, but the user is happy with the more flashy and chic design of your site.

The other important element that almost every site use are text-based links in the content of the page. Those links are usually anchor tags with appropriate keywords.

This is an effective strategy to gain website ranking. The search engine crawler visits your site, checks the linking system, content of the page and compare them together. If it finds that the links are relevant to the content, which is relevant to the keywords, it determines your ranking. Every element of the site works together in harmony.

It is crucial to design a navigational structure that is friendly for your users and crawlers that the same time. Return visits from users and high rankings are the ultimate goal. You would need to test several navigation design to determine which one is the best for your site.

Usability considerations

Sometiems it is not possible to satisfy users and crawlers at the same time. The needs of users are more important because when you get them you want them to return to your site often. As I have stated before users can be very impatient and as soon as they get bored they will leave your website.

So it is important to make a first time visitor a frequent visitor to your site.

Returning visits can make or break your site.

The goal is that in order to build returning visitors, you have to build new visitors, which is the purpose of SEO. So search engines need to take notice of your site.

When the user preferences are in conflict with crawlers preferences there is one solution called sitemap.

There are two types of sitemap. A basic simple site map is an overview designed especially for user simple navigation. It’s usually text-based, and it includes links to all of the pages in your web site. Crawlers love site maps. You should, too.

Sitemaps can be made automatically if you have a popular CMS site like Joomla or Drupal. If you are building your site with Dreamweaver you would have to create manually. You can structure sitemap links in different levels. All the text links should include keywords that you are using.

When a site map exists on your web page, a search engine crawler can locate the map and then crawl all of the pages that are linked from it. All of those pages are then included in the search engine index and will appear on search engine results pages. Where they appear on search engine results depends upon how well the SEO is done for each individual page.

A second type of site maps called XML site map. It lists all of the URLs for a web site. This file is usually not seen by site visitors and can be found in the root location of your server. It can be spotted only by crawlers that visit and cache your site.

Comments

Add New Search

Write comment
Name:
Email:	do not notifynotify
Website:
Title:
UBBCode:	-color-aquablackbluefuchsiagraygreenlimemaroonnavyolivepurpleredsilvertealwhiteyellow -size-tinysmallmediumlargehuge
	Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

Powered by !JoomlaComment 3.25

3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."