Search Engine Optimization(SEO) Best Practices

Understanding what is Search Engine Optimization is essential especially when you want to run an online business. SEO is all about increasing the visibility of your website. There are certain guidelines if followed make your website popular. Before even you start putting your content on your website, its highly recommended to understand how search engines work and what they like in your website. I was just going through various SEO guidelines that Google was suggesting and thought of putting some interesting ones that I like in this post which I can refer often and also other internet users.

• Accurate Page titles: The webpage titles are displayed in the search results and internet users read them. If the page titles describe what the page is all about, its likely that users will click on it to see more. So give attention while creating your page titles. The page title is created using <title> HTML tag of your html file. Example <title> Search Engine Optimization Techniques </title>,  <title> How to create a website</title> etc                                                                                                                 
• Accurate Page Content Descriptions: There will be description meta tag in HTML and this is where you need to put the page content descriptions that describes what exactly is your page all about. Make the description as accurate as possible. Just next to your title tag, you can define the meta tag called description as <meta name="description" content="Techno ladder blog is to share technical articles, best practices, learnings, tips and tricks in information technology"> etc. Make the description unique per page. The description meta tags are the ones that internet users and search engines love to see.                                                                                                                                         
•  Web URL Structuring : The web URL is the one that is displayed in the address bar of the browsers when the page is being viewed. These have to be simple. Lengthier URLs are not recommended. Use meaningful words in your URLS.  Simple and meaningful URL structures make it easier for search engine crawlers to crawl your page easily without the crawl errors. I have seen, there can be crawl errors because a page was not reachable due its complex url structure. Learn More about URL structures on Google Webmaster Tools help
 

• Easier Site Navigation: This is another important aspects in search engine optimizations. Navigating your website has to be a nice experience for the internet users. Otherwise its likely that users leaving your website and jumping on searching another one. Breadcrumbs are very useful and widely used that make the navigation of your site easy for the users. It may so happen that you might remove certain page during your site update, its important to remove all its links that other pages can have. This will avoid users reaching 404 Page Not Found error. Or else, redirect the yours into a custom error page from which the users can again come back to your site.Create sitemaps and make it available in the home page.                                                                                                                 
• Quality Content and Services: This is the heart of any website. Users may not look how you have created the website but the information that they need. If the content on the website is not interesting and satisfying users navigate away from the website! Make it clear that how your website content and services are going to benefit for the users. Once you define the structure of the website, its required to just concentrate on writing quality content and services and search engines do the rest for you.             
• Easy to understand Anchor Texts : The HTML anchor is used to have a link to another web URL and it has got a name. The anchor tag in HTML looks like <a href="web_url_link"> Anchor Text </a>. Here the Anchor Text has to carry the meaning of the linking page. This is the text that users are going to click. It must be easy to understand for the users to click it. Websites will have many links to other websites, only meaningful and easy to understand anchor texts are likely to be clicked.                
• Image Optimization: Avoid having text links in the images, if its done use alt text to have the image text. Search engine crawlers does not understand the text contained in an image and this is the reason why there is alt tag for all images.                                                                                                        
• Use of robots.txt: Google provides a text file called robots.txt which can be edited by the website owners to specify what needs to be crawled and pages should not crawled. This is required because you may not want certain sensitive data on your website to be crawled and make it available for the internet users. Or if you feel certain page contents are not of useful to the users, you can have Google not to crawl that page.You can also have certain links on your site not to follow using "nofollow" word in robots.txt file. Learn more about robots.txt                                                                                      
•  Enable your site for mobile viewing:  Today the internet users are moving to mobiles phones and surf the internet using their mobiles. So it becomes crucial for website owners to enable their site for mobile viewing. Verify your mobile site is also indexed by the search engines. Search engines are already available to be used in the mobile phones and so mobile sties can be verified whether or not the website is viewable in the mobile phones. To verify if your website is indexed or not, use "site" keyword followed by your website. If there are search results, then your site is indexed. For example: site:technoladder.blogspot.com, site:example etc.                                                                                         
• Promote your website: I personally believe that you need deliberately do advertise your website in social networking sites or online communities. If your website is unique and quality content, it automatically gets promoted. Word of mouth is what the strongest way to spread a word about a site and it multiplies. If internet users find your site helpful to them or helped to solve their problems in some way, then they will definitely come back to the site and even better they spread the word.

There are many aspects yet on search engine optimizations. There are many SEO companies today who 'promise' you to optimize your site and get better ranking in the search results. We'll have to be little careful here. What they claim might be proud. The truths are the truths. We just have to following above guidelines than having a someone to this for you which is not guaranteed. There are also guidelines to avoid spams which we need to study more and understand.