Search engines don’t talk with websites directly, they use bots to communicate with websites, their bots come to websites and start reading the websites, whatever they read at websites they go back to search engines carrying the messages and store those messages in search engine’s database.
Search Engines are NOT Human Beings!
Search engines view websites with different prospects. They don’t have eyes to analyze beautiful colors and animations, don’t have ears to listen music and don’t have feelings to fall in love with your catchy slogans. Apart of all these disabilities they can evaluate your website better than a human being.
When you develop or going to get your website developed, what things you should keep in mind? Being website Owner you might think of website design and content, being Webmaster you might think of easy navigation and flexibility of website. You might be missing one very important aspects of search engine positioning, and that is how search engine is viewing your website?
What Things Search Engines Like at Your Website?
Good communication can increase the performance, it applies the same to search engines, if your website can communicate well enough to create good impression to search engines, your website will be facilitating with high rankings then, here is a list of elements search engines like.
- Validated and Optimize Code
- Rich Content
- Unique URL of Each Webpage
- Plain URLs
- Proper Internal Linking
- Healthy Incoming Links
- Text Based Navigation
- Neat Table Structure
- Good Directory and File Structure
- Proper Headings, Subheadings, Captions
- Title, Meta Tags and Alt Tags
- Robots.txt
What Things Search Engines Dislike at Your Website?
Take care of the elements which can hurt your view to search engines, thought each search engine has its own criteria of viewing websites but all major search engines dislike these mentioned elements.
- Broken Links
- Invalid Code
- JavaScript
- Orphan Links, Images and Files
- Under-construction Page/es
- Pop ups
- Redirectors
- IP Tracking
- Dynamically Generated Pages
- Frames
- Same Background and Font Colors
- Multi Nested Table Structure
Search engine bots crawl website with different time frame period, it depends upon how frequently your website updates? Each search engine has its own time frequency to crawl websites, now you know what things do matter to search engines, take care of them so that your website can delivery its message well enough to get top rankings.
Best of luck 
About The Author
Wahid Qazi is a Researcher, SEO, Trainer, Speaker and Author, specializes in google optimization and promotion.
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Search engine optimization effort can be categorized into three basic elements “Code, Content and Linking (CCL)” these three diverse elements play very important role in search engine rankings, you will come to know about their effectiveness and usability with some of the very useful tips in this article.
| Code |
Content |
Linking |
| Writing Code |
Content Writing |
Internal linking |
| Validating Code |
Formatting |
Incoming or Inbound linking |
| Cleaning & Optimization Code |
Content Placement |
Anchor linking |
| Cross Brower Independence |
Content Distribution |
Navigation |
| Robots.txt and sitemap |
Content Updating |
Site Structuring |
Code
Code of the website is the very first element that is unfortunately ignored by most SEOs, website code allows search engines bots to go through the webpage, and if bots will not be able to understand code they will not be able to access content of the webpage because content is kept within code, this is enough to tell you about the importance of website code.
Code of the website has to be clean and optimized, here i means that code like JavaScripts or CSS should be called externally, try to keep your code as short as possible and ignore too much nesting.
You must validated complete website code either everything is working fine or not, check for browser compatibility, orphan pages and broken links, don’t forget to have robots.txt and sitemap.
Content
Content is still king, no one can deny the fact that since the revolution of search engine in mid 90s, content is undefeated king. Content needs special treatment, today search engines automatically take keywords within content, they become more conscious about content, they follow basic fundamentals of writing techniques, such as headings, sub-headings, bullets & numbered, inverted commas.
Now it’s up to you either you are successfully able to give an impression of your important keywords to search engines, try to use your important keywords in headings, sub-headings and try to start paragraphs with important keywords.
Note: – Here content means selectable content, content on images can’t be selected and read by search engine bots.
Linking
Linking is one of the most important criteria to get better rankings in search engines specially in google. Linking is divided into two categories onsite linking and offsite linking. Onsite linking belongs to links that are mentioned at your web-domain either they are internal or external it doesn’t matter, they have to be declare at your website (domain). Offsite linking belongs to links that point your web-domain from a different web-domain, they are inbound or incoming links to your website (domain).
In internal linking you should try to keep web pages as close as possible to root, if you have a big site of over 100 pages or 500 pages then you have to make relevant directories and keep relevant pages in them.
In link-building you have to keep few things in mind that link has to be one way, and link title and description should be very focus, try to have incoming links from relevant sites, since one relevant link is equal to 100 irrelevant links, when submitting to directories, go as deep as possible and try to find most relevant category where you can submit your site.
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It’s a two parts article series, in part 1, I’ve already explained you about “What is SEO Copy Writing? Why Content is Still King? How to Balance Copy Writing Keeping Users and Search Engines in Mind? Who should I Write for Search Engines OR for Visitors? And Well Targeted Written Content is more valuable”
How to Develop a Successful SEO Copy Writing Strategy
There are five very important elements to develop a successful SEO copy writing strategy, a certain amount of content at website need to be updated periodically.
- Research the best keywords for your business / services
- Analyze the content of your competitors
- Logical distribution of selected keywords through out website
- Writing for those selected keywords
- On going fresh content
All these elements are very important and need healthy amount of time, there can’t be a standard because each strategy is unique and different. The more you study the better you’ll be able to produce.
Dos and Don’ts of Writing
When it comes to write for your website, you need to have your target audience in mind rather to facilitate search engines, respect your site visitors and educate them about your offered products or services. There is a list of dos and don’ts of writing for search engine.
Dos
- Try to use keywords in upper top 2000 characters including code
- Start paragraph with keywords
- Start sentence with keywords
- Use keywords in headings and sub headings
- Use keywords in bullets or as numbered
- Keep textual alternate navigation at bottom
- Have a breadcrumb at complete website and try to include keywords in it wherever possible
Don’ts
- Avoid using keywords at images or pictures
- Avoid using keywords in deep paragraph, since deeper use of keywords will have lesser value to search engines
- Avoid using pronoun for replacing important keywords, since pronouns won’t be of any value to search engines
- Don’t have link title for text based links
- Avoid keeping duplicate content on different pages of same website
- Never use copied OR pirated content at your website
SEO Copy Writing Techniques
- Search the relevant words (keywords) which are searched the most : Finding right keywords which correctly represent your company/products/services as well as they should be searched
- Try to focus on the words (keywords) when writing : Whenever write, keep focusing on keywords, try to repeat keywords but keeping the visitors in mind, your copy should be written for your visitors
- Unique/Original Content : Writing original and unique content is one of the most important aspect of your successful copywriting, the moment you upload your content try to make your content crawled by search engines, so that you can have the copy rights of that content, since search engines will take that content original which they crawled first, if your original content is copied and search engines have crawled that copied content first they may find your content as pirated, that’s why it’s very important to make your content authorized and copy right by search engines
- Fresh Content : Search engines give a lot of value to fresh content, since more frequently updates make your website more attractive to site visitors
- Focused and Relevant : Focused and relevant content is highly appreciated by search engines comparatively to those sites which are scatter or not focused
- Selectable and Visible Content : Search engines can’t read text over images, they also dislike hidden text, they can easily read selectable and visible content at website
- Proper Formatting Techniques : Search engines are able to recognize text formatting such as headings, sub headings, emphasis words, slogans, tag line, paragraph title, picture title…
- Short and Compiled : Short and complied content is always liked by site visitors as well as search engines, but as far as the quality of the content is concern it should not be compromised on the length of the content
- Keyword Utilization : Keywords should be used in “Title, Description, Headings, Sub-Headings, Bullets, Numbered, Bold, Italic, Underline, Hyperlinks, Anchor links, Alt Attributes, Link Titles, Table Names, Picture Names, File Names, Directories Names”
- Keywords Specific/Topical Writing Technique : SEO Friendly copying writing is a topical writing where keywords should be treated as topics, and writer should write about that topic, so that search engines can get attracted towards that topic / keywords
Now you know what it takes to write for website, you might be one step closer to improve your search engine rankings. You just need to follow the all mentioned guidelines that are listed in this article, if you have any question or want to have a personal training, write to me at Wahid@wahidqazi.com
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How I despise those awful, cheesy pages promoting the “secrets” of search engine optimization. How I loathe the slick salesman pictured in fuzzy, 1980’s-style photography promising you “the hidden tactics SEOs don’t wan’t you to know.” When most search folks think of the “ultimate secret” in SEO,” they probably think about one of these:
- Keywords in the Title Tag
- Spiderable Links & Content
- Anchor Text in Links
- Links from Quality Websites
Those are all good pieces of advice, and important to high rankings, but even the last one (links from quality websites) doesn’t convey the most important part of successful ranking campaigns. If there is one key to high search engine rankings, a single piece of advice that unlocks the door to the top of Google & Yahoo! it’s this: Your website must appeal to a link-savvy audience.
Simple? Sadly, no. The truth is that the very best website in the world that sells your product, offers your content or promotes your cause may not be good enough to make it to the top of the engines. Why? Because the world of search has an inherent bias to those sites with more links. It’s not enough to build links now through manual link requests or link buying, nor is it enough to bolster these link acquisitions with a flawlessly “optimized” website filled with keyword-targeted pages. These strategies, while effective in the short term, won’t guarantee you success in the long run. To have a shot at keeping the top positions for years to come, you need a strategy that naturally drives links to your site again and again. The “secret” is that the audience most sites appeal to is NOT the same audience that provides links, yet this group (the Linkerati) has the power to make or break a site’s rankings.
Let’s walk through a brief history of search engines to see how this happened:
No, Hotbot Monster, back in the early days, you really weren’t. Measuring repetition of keywords and keyword placement and density led to some pretty bad results and a lot of cloaking and spamming.
With the arrival of Google’s PageRank and Apostolos Gerasoulis’ Teoma (now called ExpertRank), the search engines got smarter, mapping the link patterns of the web and giving higher ranks to those sites & pages with more inbound links.
Over the last 8 years, the engines have been refining the way they measure links, taking into account context, relevance, trust and other metrics to help indicate which links are worth counting towards a particular ranking.
All of this algorithmic evolution means that sites wishing to rank at the top of the engines must have high quality, naturally given, topically relevant links. Since search rankings are so valuable, massive amounts of time and money pour into campaigns for the most competitive queries, making the struggle for placement increasingly difficult. This brings us to the fundamental issue that site creators struggle against – segmenting visitors accurately and appealing to the “Linkerati.”
Above are three groups of visitors, applicable to nearly every commercial or goal-oriented website in existence. While most sites do a reasonable job identifying and targeting the 2nd group (in blue) from the first (in green), this isn’t the case with the 3rd group (in red). Those red Llinkerati are essential to your site’s rankings – they are the great “secret” of long-term SEO success. In order to leverage their power, you must create compelling content that appeals to their desires. This really is no “secret” at all. In every interview and on every stage, you’ll hear representatives from Google, Yahoo!, MSN & Ask repeat this same mantra (albeit without the benefit of colorful diagrams). As an example:
“…the sort of people who have been doing “new” SEO, or whatever you want to call it, that’s social media optimization, link bait, things that are interesting to people and attract word of mouth and buzz, those sorts of sites naturally attract visitors, attract repeat visitors, attract back links, attract lots of discussion, those sorts of sites are going to benefit as the world goes forward.” – Matt Cutts in an interview with Gord Hotchkiss
Why are these Linkerati so powerful? What makes their opinions and influence so important to average website owners? Easy – the power to control the web’s link structure.
The web’s content may still be overwhelmingly commercial and organizational in scope, controlled by exceutives at companies, museum curators, government taxonomists, etc. But, the link landscape of the web, particularly those links that point externally from sites, are dominated by the Linkerati. If your competitors or even organizations like Wikipedia, About.com, niche bloggers or industry news publications become more popular with the Linkerati than you, how can you ever expect to compete for search engine rankings?
This is the great “secret” of SEO – that (at least) some content on your website must be targeted to the Linkerati – fulfilling their unquenchable thirst for new material to link to and share and spread virally. Although they may be a vastly different population than your customers, you need their respect and approval in order to continue to draw in targeted leads from the engines.
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