This is the second part of the series on how to better structure your site for SEO purposes. The first section was mostly talking about basic layout tips, keyword placement, and how to use your title tag to its maximum advantage. TO see the first part you can read more details over here: Website SEO Part 1. This is all well and good, but you will still need to figure out what keywords you’re going to need to go for, as well as how to use some of the more interesting tools for making your site more noticeable in search engine form.
Meta Tags
Meta tags are a very important part of constructing your page, but not for the reasons that one would think. Meta tags are more commonly used to control the behavior of the crawlers that determine your ranking. They tell the crawlers whether or not a page should be indexed, whether it should be crawled at all, or whether they need to be archived. Other common meta tags are used to control whether or not snippets and descriptions should be collected about the page at hand.
If you want to add a description to your site or an element of it, meta tags can be used to help promote a description that users or crawlers will see. It’s wise to add keywords to your meta tags once in a while, even if crawlers usually don’t use them.
Making A Good URL
Part of having a great site also involves having a URL that is easy enough for people to remember, and easy for people to predict. They are displayed in a multitude of ways, so choosing good URLs that are relevant to your content is crucial. Here’s how to get the most of your URLs.
- Your URL should reflect what’s going on. A good URL is a predictable URL. So, if you are trying to make a site devoted to pets, have a URL that somehow reflects that. Having a URL that has nothing to do with what your site is about will only throw a wrench in your efforts to gain traffic.
- Don’t overuse keywords in your URLs. URLs should have a keyword or two in them once in a while. However, overusing them can end up causing your site to trigger a reaction in spam filters, and totally negate your ability to get posted on search engine rankings.
- Static URLs are better. There are programs that turn number-based URLs into more human-friendly URLs. It’s worth doing.
- Think like a user when putting together a URL. You want to have a URL that is very easy to remember, or easy for a person to understand. You want a memorable URL that’s also readable. Hyphenating URLs can make them more readable. Shorter URLs with catchy names are easier to remember.
The Importance of Good, Original Content
Search engines love good quality content that is 100% original, and they actively seek out providers of fresh content in order to get better search results quality. Many major search engines will actually weed out sites that have duplicate content, or low quality content. To avoid accidentally getting duplicate content on your pages, linking pages with different versions of the same content to the same URL can help prevent getting penalized. This is called canonicalization.
Scraper Websites?!? wHAT is ThaT?
Scrapers are sites that steal quality content and spin it to make it their own – or even just cut and paste it into their sites! To avoid being mistaken for a scraper site, it’s important to ping Google and other search engines when you first submit your content. To further prevent scrapers from getting your content, you can also implement absolute links instead of the typical relative links that make it easy for scraper software to snag content.
Should your content be very high profile and very popular, it will be very likely that people will start to try to steal it by many other means. When this happens, there are a number of ways to prevent theft from continuing. Some of these methods include DMCA warning letters, actually reaching out to the site owners, or in certain cases, actually mentioning it to Google.
When doing any sort of web design that is involved as search engine optimization, it’s crucial to remember that content is king. So, keep your content interesting, full, and fresh – and above all, protect your content from those who want to steal it.
