Here are 6 SEO site redesign tips to keep your new site search engine friendly:-

1. Creating Your SEO’d Site Architecture

Search engine spiders pay a lot of attention to how your pages are linked together, pages that have inbound links from every other page on your site will be given more weight than those that are only linked from a couple of others.

Don’t bury content that was previously bringing targeted search engine traffic too deep within the new sites structure. Ensure that content focused around the more competitive key terms are placed fairly high in your sites hierarchy.

2. Categorization and Avoiding Duplicate Content

People seeking information from a search engine tend to have a question,  problem, or a need for specific information. The search terms they type into the search engines reflect this. The more ways you can categorize your content for different target markets you serve, the better.

Try to make sure that all of your top-level pages answer the visitors potential questions, and make it clear that your products and services can solve their problem. To avoid any duplicate content issues you should also ensure that regardless of how someone found any piece of content on your site, they always end up at the same URL.  For example, if a specific product can be classified as both a product and a service, it makes sense that it might be listed under both categories. However, the page (URL) that the potential customer eventually lands on, regardless of which category they started in, should always be the same.

3. New Content Management System and Changing URLS

Search engines take time to index new URL’s  and give them any kind of weight. During your redesign if URL’s have to be updated for any reason, whether it be due to a new content management system or back-end coding, it’s vital to 301-redirect all old URLs to their relevant counterparts on the redesigned site. This will ensure that the link popularity of the old URL’s are swiftly passed onto the new ones, this will also ensure site visitors don’t receive 404-not-found errors if trying to access old URL’s.

4. Coding of Navigation Menus

Any links that are contained within the navigation menu of your site should be coded in a search engine– friendly manner. Some DHTML and flash menus are invisible to search engines, so can’t be crawled which consequently causes the pages linked within them to not receive the link popularity they should and possibly even not get indexed at all.

Ensure all navigational menus are coded with CSS, this will make them visible and therefore crawlable to the search engine spiders. It’s also best to make sure your content can be reached by hard-coded links, –don’t force visitors to go through any kind of search box menu as they are generally not very search engine friendly.

5. Custom HTML Elements

Some level of automation for metas, headers, URLs, and alt attributes for images can be helpful but it’s vital for an effective optimisation that your new websites content management system (CMS) allows you to manually input custom descriptions for these as well.

Make sure your CMS has fields available to enter data for meta tags, heading tags, etc. Some systems only allow one set of global tags but it is far more effective to optimise individual pages so try to use a system which has this function.

6. Session IDs and Other Tracking Links

Generally it’s best not to use session IDs to track your sites visitors,  however if your system has to use them you’ll only need to feed the “clean” URLs to the search engine spiders ,– otherwise they may get caught in an infinite loop, indexing the same content under multiple URLs which will result in duplicate content issues.

There will probably always be a few unexpected bugs to work out when your new site goes live but by following the above at least you won’t have to be afraid of losing your search engine visitors.  There’s nothing like the feeling of having your beautiful new website launched, but even better is knowing that the people looking for what you offer will continue to be able to easily find you in the search engines.

The snippet performs a couple of functions – it gives you a summary of what the page is about, and it shows you the context within which your query terms might appear on a page. Sometimes the search engine will decide to display the meta description tag if it feels it is most relevant to the search query you have entered. Other times it displays different information from various different places.

Sometimes it will display a snippet of text from your page’s content if it feels something you have written is more related to the search query. But sometimes it will display text not even found on your website. In this case, where is the information coming from?

If the search engine decides that the page is relevant to your search query but the content doesn’t give a good enough summary in relation to the search query it can pull information from various other places that has a better description, including the Yahoo Directory or DMOZ.

If snippets aren’t very informative, in relation to the search query, it may deter people from clicking onto particular websites or they may not click onto the most helpful or relevant websites. Poor quality snippets can lead to a poor searching experience so the search engines are fine-tuned to deliver quality and relevant information for as many websites and searchers as possible.

OK, so you rank in the top 3 for a fantastic keyword that’s searched regularly. You’ve worked hard to get that position and you’re still working to keep it there and push it higher. Yet you aren’t getting half the traffic you’d expect from ranking so high? We’ve been there.

Marketing taps into people’s emotions. Apply that to your SEO and how Google and other search engines interpret your content. While in the search results there isn’t much you have to play with in order to to tap into people’s emotions, there are changes you can make to help attract people to your site and get you those extra clicks.

Offer something interesting and attractive in your meta description or snippet. For many online shops, displaying a price is very effective – particularly if they are competitive prices. This way the user can see you are cheap before they even visit you. If no one else is displaying prices then you’ve pretty much guaranteed that click if you are cheaper than they were expecting.

Use a descriptive URL. I’m not just talking the domain name here. I’m talking your interior pages as well. They should also be named something descriptive that tells the user what they should expect if they visit that page.

Don’t make your description a sales pitch. Keep it short and sweet but also detailed without being too technical to entice those who know exactly what they are after and those who know roughly what they want. Also be honest and don’t over-hype something as this will lead to mis-trust and will likely lose you a click.

You can use Google AdWords to see what kinds of descriptions work better for converting. Although this will require funds, it will allow you to run alternate versions of your description week after week so you can see the combination that converts the best, then apply this to your meta description and title tags.

Don’t use superlatives. These are words that suggest you feature something of a greater degree to that of anything else – words such as top, best, most, greatest or superior. These can often come across as quite pushy and salesy and may force the user to click elsewhere if they aren’t happy with your ‘pitch’.

Is there anything else you can do to increase conversions from the organic results in the search engines?

Unique product descriptions

Avoid simply using the manufacturer’s generic product description as it’s highly likely that  many other sites selling the same products as you will  be using it already. It may be an easier option in the short term to do this but will not do your website any good in the search engines as they will penalise your site for containing duplicate content.

A unique product description will not only help you to attract more search engine traffic but should also help to increase your conversion rate. A slightly lengthier product page will also enable you to include more of your main key terms which again should improve your positions within the search engines.

Use keywords in URLs

Many online retailers tend to use dynamic databases which can produce some ugly, lengthy URLs which bear no significance to the product.

Adding related keywords to your product page URLs will help them rank higher in search engines, as well as making the pages more understandable to your visitors.

Use customer product reviews

Customer reviews are not only a great way of persuading shoppers to purchase your products, they can also be very useful in terms of SEO.

Adding reviews is a great way to ensure your product pages are filled with plenty of unique content – which is something the search engines love.

Make sure product pages are just a couple of clicks away

This is great practice anyway as it will allow customers to find your products  quickly and easily,  it also makes it easier for the search engine spiders to access,crawl and therefore index these pages.

Optimise your images for SEO

With the introduction of universal search more and more images will be popping up in the search results, therefore every image on your product pages should be well optimised.

Optimise your product photos with  keyword-rich, descriptive  ALT tags and file names.  Also adding descriptions to your images will help the visually impaired use your site.

So with such a flexible and powerful platform (one that doesn’t even need to be used for a blog!) it makes sense to make the most of it’s usefulness and ease of use as a business tool and take advantage of every opportunity to optimise your WordPress blog for the search engines.

To get you started WordPress Codex includes a page dedicated to SEO topics and this page is a must-read for anyone running a WordPress blog or website.

There are a also number of great plug-ins that make it easy to implement SEO techniques with WordPress:

• All in One SEO Pack, a very popular plugin that performs a number of functions, including optimizing your page titles, adding META tags automatically and removing common duplicate content.
• Google XML Sitemaps which is another popular plug-in, Google XML Sitemaps creates a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap for your blog.
• KB Robots.txt enabling you to create and edit Robots.txt files from within the WordPress admin.
• Redirection helps you monitor 404 errors, automatically manage 301 redirections when a post URL changes and has a powerful set of features that helps you redirect users to different pages based on various conditions.
• Breadcrumb NavXT adds breadcrumb navigation to your WordPress blog with this plug-in.
• WordPress Related Posts allows your blog to feature related posts.
• SEO Friendly Images automatically adds the ALT and TITLE attributes to images.
• Nofollow Case by Case enables you to decide which comments should have or nofollow attribute which is otherwise automatically added by WordPress.

Have you used any other plugins that you found useful or prefer to use regularly? Please comment below.

Luckily, such sites are few and far between. So, to help with building better websites that are much more search engine friendly (whether you use an SEO or not) we’ve devised a quick list of some points you should bear in mind when designing and developing your site:

Navigation

• Make sure navigation doesn’t lose the visitor or search engine.
• Give the website an easy to understand hierarchy. Categories and sub-categories are a good idea, starting generic and getting more specific the deeper the level. This will require some planning.
• Don’t use javascript menus. These are not crawlable and not everyone’s browser will support javascript. CSS menus are the perfect alternative and are crawlable.
• Ensure all pages are reachable within a few clicks. Adding links to the content is a good way of doing this.
• Think about using a breadcrumb navigation if your site goes more than a few levels deep so the user can easily find their way back to the next level up or the home page
• Keep it simple.

Coding

• Keep the coding clean. Unformatted code with masses of inline CSS can be confusing for anyone to edit the page.
• Longer pages take longer to load so keep the coding as streamlined as possible and aim for better performance.
• Ensure all styles are in an external styleheet file, making the page file much smaller in size. Also ensure that any unused styles are removed, as well as unnecessary comments.

Headings

• Don’t use images for headings unnecessarily. If you must use a particular non-web-friendly font use image replacement so the text is still spiderable and the heading is still readable once the stylesheet is removed, say, for some mobile browsers.
• Make use of the hierarchical headings such as H1, H2, H3… for tiered page headings and keep things consistent.

Only when the above has been completed to an acceptable standard can you really start looking at SEO in detail. Following the above guidelines will help you create a well-structured and crawlable site that has the potential to succeed within the search engines and can be easily optimised for further success.

With the right foundations in place SEO has the power to be a fantastic marketing tool but you need a solid underlying structure.

Is there anything I may have missed? Please add your thoughts below.

Link from your stronger pages
There are bound to be one or more pages within your website that does particularly well, either in terms of PR or positions within the search engines.

You can give strength to your weaker pages by linking to them from your strong pages, building the overall strength of your website.

Link within your content
Add links within the text of your pages. It’s worth going through the content of each page and working out which phrases could be linked to another page.

You will have to make sure relevant phrases are selected and the pages they link to are within context and is a good idea to ensure that the anchor text of the hyperlink match those that you want the page to rank for and that they appear on the destination page, making the whole strategy much more effective.

Link from your footer
Now this approach is not only helps with your ranking strategy but also with usability, as it incorporates almost a mini site map on each of your pages.

You can link to some of your primary pages within your footer and can incorporate some longer keyword phrases. Again, the links will need to be contextual and link to a relevant page.

Links from newsletter and blogs
Having articles present in newsletters or blogs are other sources of internal links. If they are hosted on a separate domain these could be beneficial to your SEO and prove additional value. Even if they are hosted on your own domain they can be of value by contributing to your internal linking strategy.

Again, use relevant and contextual anchor text within the link back to the main website to help direct traffic to the most important parts of your website and build the link profile for your main interior pages.

Build a good site map
Another effective SEO technique that also helps with overall usability, building a good site map entails creating a page purely to include links to all of your pages in a user friendly and simple way.

Your site map should contain text links and not images and should include relevant anchor text that depicts what the user should find on each page as well as reflects the keyphrases each page is optimised for. For example you could not only include product names within the anchor text but also popular keywords for that page.

Do you have any other internal linking strategies that you’ve found to be useful? Please share below.

In comparison, you on the other hand might have been working extremely hard to rank for that content, through numerous optimisation techniques including gaining quality inbound links yet still have very little to show for it. What people aren’t aware of is that these high ranking sites have managed to reach a high trust level within the search engines which allows their content to rank highly.

A lot of time and patience is needed to build trust within the search engines but here are 25 essential SEO tips that will help:-

• Ensure your whois record is up to date and make sure there’s a visible record of the domain owner including name, address, phone number and email address.
• There is a lot of debate surrounding this subject but it seems to be the case that better results can be achieved with top level domains so it’s well worth considering using a .com, .org, or .net etc domain.
• The age of the domain name is very important to Google therefore if starting a new online business you should definitely consider purchasing an existing domain name as opposed to  registering a  brand new one.
• If your domain contains more than 2 words it’s best to try and avoid the use  of hyphens in the URL as this can sometimes look spammy, for example www.RedCarCentre.net is far better than www.Red-Car-Centre.net.
• Google assumes that when starting an online business you’re in it for the long run so when buying a new domain or renewing its generally better to opt for a longer registration period of at least 2 years before its due for renewal.
• Used a clean fixed IP address and try to stick with it for the long run.
• Verify your site with Google Webmaster central , this will aid you to  learn of  negative issues your site may have which could effect  the amount of trust your site will be able to obtain.
• Clearly display your contact details including address and phone number on your site.
• If needed clearly display links to your  terms and conditions and privacy policy on your site and update site maps if necessary.
• Don’t go over the top with your sites optimisation as this flags up spam filters and is sometimes misinterpereted with the use of automated software which wont bide well within the search engines.
• Avoid creating too many cross links on other sites you own as again this can flag up spam filters within the search engines.
• Keep your sites content up to date, making sure you update regularly. This will show the search engines you are actively trying to provide useful information on a regular basis.
• Don’t use doorway pages that transfer you across to another website as becomes a big frustration to both visitors and the search engines.
• Try to obtain your inbound links organically.  People are becoming more and more reliant on the use of automated link buying/selling software which has lead to the search engines having a big cramp down on this type of strategy.
• Your backlinks anchor text should be varied and not always under that one term that you really want to rank well, by using a variation of anchor text it will help the search engines to see your links have been naturally created.
• Sites that link to your own ideally should contain as little other out going links as possible.
• Try to maintain your pages below 100K as this will make them more easily crawlable.
• Use an XML site map generator to create your site map and make sure you update it whenever you add or remove pages.
• Review your robot.txt file to make sure you’re not blocking certain parts of your website from being crawled and indexed.
• Build on your content to make the information you supply interesting and useful as this will make more people want to naturally link to your site from their own.
• You should work towards decreasing your sites bounce rate as a higher bounce rate is sometimes that your site isn’t supplying  relevant content.
• An inbound link from the three major human edited directories dmoz , Yahoo Directory and Best of The Web helps.
• Try to limit the amount of dofollow links to on your site to around 100.
• If using a new domain only link to trusted sites within your sector for the initial 6 months.
• Keep your content unique, the search engines can see when duplicate content has been used and this will hinder your sites performance within the search engines.

Now you know the basics start building your sites trust today…

By not optimising your images you could be missing out on valuable traffic from Google Image Search, which has become one of Google’s most popular search systems.  Here are 5 tips that can help you optimise your images correctly and gain traffic from searches being made for images.

Use Descriptive Image Names and Folder Names

If you’re saving your images using default names like 00229.gif the search engines wont be able to easily identify what your image may contain therefore it’s far better to use descriptive image names instead. For example if your site displays an image of a blue racing car the image name blue-racing-car.gif is far better.

Use Descriptive Alt Tags

Another great way of providing the search engines with clues about what’s your images contain is to use descriptive alt tags.

Without going over the top the more description that’s used within the alt tags the better. For example, instead of using ‘Golf GTA‘ as your alt tag, ‘This GOLF GTA one first prize at the car show‘ is better.

From past research it seems that Google Image Search prefers sentence-form descriptions and it probably down to the fact that text in sentence-form is likely to contain more descriptive keywords and helps the search engines to see you’re not trying to spam their systems but It’s still important not to stuff your alt tags with keywords unnecessarily.

Use Descriptive Anchor Text

If you’re going to be linking to your images using text again use descriptive text that describes what’s contained in the image.

Use Larger Images

There have been several reports published which suggest Google Image Search prefers larger images. While there is no concrete evidence for this  it’s important to remember that SEO isn’t truly effective unless users click on your listings and someone searching for an image is more likely to click on a larger image that’s high in quality than a smaller low quality image.

Focus on the Page

As with all SEO, content is king. It’s not just about giving your images the right file names or using descriptive alt tags etc. Its also very important to make sure that the website pages your images display on are themselves well optimised and easily accessible by the search engines.

When your website pages themselves are well optimised the implementation of these image tips will be icing on the cake.

Well, it makes sense that if a site doesn’t make any mention of any keywords it wants to be found under, how is Google expected to know what the site is about? And how can it accurately rank that among sites that make regular references to that term? Sure, sites can be ranked under a particular keyword term or phrase purely by a good inbound linking campaign, but new sites can also rank well and all they have is the on-page information. It makes sense that at least the usage of keywords has some effect on a websites’ rankings.

Although some agree with that concept, others disagree. Is keyword density itself a factor? Let’s see what some of the professional SEOs think.

Brett Tabke

Like everything in search – it has evolved. I think the old kw density calc is the new ‘proximity calc’.

• If the keyword isn’t on the page – it isn’t going to rank well (or at all) for that keyword.
• If the keyword isn’t in the title of the page, it is going to be tougher to rank for that keyword.
• If the keyword isn’t in the url, the task becomes more difficult.
• What about in a big header on the page?
• What about high on the page, or strategically spaced throughout the document?
• Offsite density? Anchor text is another type of density.

I think keyword density needs to be changed to proximity density. It is closer heat map today than the pure numbers game of old.

Tim Nash

Repetition of keywords seems to have at least some effect on the rankings for those terms, particularly when combined with other factors such as the use of heading tags and title tag. However the effect is quickly lost if you stuff the keywords.

If you imagine that the glass can only contain a finite amount of liquid and your keywords are separate glasses, the more keywords the more glasses how you divvy up the liquid is almost irrelevant as you still have only a certain amount of liquid to start with.

Sebastian

‘Optimal keyword density’ is a myth. Today’s search engines are way too smart to fall for such poor optimization methods.

Even a single inbound link with a good anchor text can boost a page lacking the keyword in question so that it outranks every page with tuned keyword density.

Paul Stevens

Focus more on writing good relative content, proper page structure and decent link building than keyword density. I remember when I first started in SEO, I had an Desktop Software Application checking my pages and telling me that I was short in my keyword density. So I stuffed more keywords in till the application was happy.

Then I released it into the search engines. The page never really ranked that highly. What was worse the client wasn’t too happy that his page read crap as well. I’ve never looked at keyword density since.

Barry Welford

Keyword density gets less and less relevant all the time, at least for Google with Latent Semantic Analysis, Personalized Search, etc., etc.

Most results come from the ‘long tail’ of combinations of keywords. What counts is conversions to sales, if that’s your real business objective. Poorly executed SEO may even work against conversions if it turns off human prospects.

Bill Slawski

Just for a different perspective, I took a look at the USPTO database, which only goes back to the early 2000s, and at Google Scholar.

There are 15 granted patents and 48 patent applications that use the phrase “keyword density.” None of those are from Google or Yahoo, and only a very few are from Microsoft and IBM, which also work in enterprise search. A number of the patent filings were applied for by Overture around the time of their acquisition by Yahoo, but focus upon paid search, referring to keyword density as something that non paid search may be using.

Google Scholar reveals 208 instances of the phrase “keyword density,” and none of the documents listed appear to come from anyone working at a major search engine, though a 2006 paper from a Lycos researcher suggests the use of keyword density.

I’ve always considered keyword density to be more likely folklore than fact. I don’t think that will change.

Jim Boykin

“Keyword Density” (using a ratio of keywords to the total text on a page) is not a good metric for SEO anymore.

Yes, your keywords should be on the page… but beyond that, writing “naturally” is better SEO than worrying about keyword density.

What are your thoughts on keyword density? Does it still apply? Is proximity or prominence now more relevant? Or doesn’t it matter at all? What are your experiences and thoughts? Comments on keyword density are all welcome.

Credit goes to Shaun Anderson for his in-depth conversations with the SEO specialists quoted above.