As well as link building and on-page optimization, there are some other very important SEO factors which can help your website index and rank in search engine listings. The following techniques are grouped into the category named ‘website optimization’ and should not be overlooked when preparing an SEO campaign.
Domain Age and Expiration Date
Google and other search engines include many factors within their ranking system. One of these factors is trust rank. Owning a domain that has history improves the trust rank as does registering the domain for a long period of time. Try to make it always in up time. I lost my traffic almost 30% when my domain down for a week.
Website History
Again trust rank comes into play here. If your website has been archived in the search engine results for a long period then it will help improve rankings and indexing of web pages created in comparison with a fairly new website with no history. So.. my blog is still new since its age only 1 years old.
Structured Navigation
When creating a website, it is important to provide a well structured navigation, not just for users but also to allow search engine bots to follow links and index web pages within your website. Structuring your navigation correctly can help all you webpages be indexed and should help the flow of Google’s Page Rank spread through out the website.
Valid HTML
As with structured navigation, the importance of valid HTML to search engine bots is to allow all webpages within your website to be indexed within the search engine listings. Validating your HTML will ensure that the bots do not hit any ‘brick walls’ within the code that prevent them from reading the rest of the webpage.
Contextual Linking
To further help the indexing of your webpages and to even out the flow of Google’s PageRank, it is useful to include links within the content text of your webpages. Wikipedia is a perfect example of how this should be done. Every time you write some thing that related with your previous article just link to it.
URL Structure Including keywords in your website’s URLs will help you rank for those terms. If your website uses dynamic URLs created through variables then think about rewriting them. Separate keywords using a minus character (eg. search-phrase.html) and try and keep the important keywords as close to the beginning of the URL as possible.
Regional Targeting
If you wish to target a certain region then there are a few steps you can take to help this process. Firstly you can choose a relevant domain such as a .co.uk (UK) or .de (Germany) rather than a generic .com domain. Then look at your hosting IP location, search engines can access this information and will use it to decide your target audience. Finally, Google Webmaster Tools allows you to set a geographic target which is useful if you have a .com domain.
Site Maps
Search engine bots look for site maps when they visit your website. Providing a standard HTML site map will help improve the indexing of your webpages and allow bots to find webpages that they might otherwise have missed. You can now also provide and submit an XML site map which all the major search engines have took on as a standard. Use your robots.txt to tell bots where to find your XML site map and also submit it to Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer.
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