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SEO Tips: Part 36 – Optimizing Post Title for Search Engines

ashish — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 19:46:39 +0000

In this post, we talk about how the Title of the Post is something that needs a lot of careful attention. Till the time that I learnt how to be effective about the title of a post, I used to use large post titles, something that I learnt could be a waste of effort, and in some cases, could cause a penalty from the search engines (related to keyword stuffing). Let me provide an example from this post itself. If I was using my previous process of defining the title of a post, the post would have the following title “Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 36 – Ensuring the post title is optimized for Search Engines”. I used to think that the more descriptive a post title along with keywords in it, the better would the reception in the search engines. And I knew about keyword stuffing, and how search engines are using penalties for such stuffing rather than getting the user the benefit that they expect.
So, what is it about the title of a post ?
Well, most search engines look only at the first 60 characters of the title of a post, and ignore whatever comes after that. So if you consider the alternative lengthy title that was there in the previous paragraph, the search engines would have ignored the actual title of the post, which came near the end “Ensuring the post title is optimized for Search Engines”. Instead, the first part of the title, dealing with Optimization Tips and Tricks would have been used by the search engines, and we know how hotly contested those keywords are. Instead, by changing the post title, it is more likely that users searching specifically for why the post title is important for SEO would find your post, and they would also find the content valuable.
Next, if you look at the earlier proposed title, it contains the keywords ‘Search Engine’ 3 times. This is an absolute no-no, since search engines are getting much more efficient about penalizing sites that seem to do keyword stuffing, and this case would have fallen right into that bracket. Why take that chance, especially when you are not likely to get any benefits from this. And then the title is so long that it would get wrapped in many instances, especially if people are looking up search results from mobile phones and tablets, and likely to make it more difficult to read. You want people to be quickly able to read the title of your post when the search engines display a long list of search results, so that it is more likely that they will come to your site.
So, if you want your post to have a higher chance of being picked up in search engine results and also being selected by users peering through a whole page of search results, learn how to optimize the title of your post. Trust me, it will be well worth it, especially since the effort required is very minimal.

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 35 – The impact of page speed upon search engine optimization

ashish — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 11:42:43 +0000

In the previous post (SEO and inline code / CSS), I talked about the impact of having a large amount of extra stuff in your files, such as scripting code and CSS, and how this can potentially impact your SEO optimization levels and your ranking. In this post, the focus is going to be on site speed and its implication for search engine ranking (specifically for Google, but one would assume for other search engines later as well).
Having pages that are loading quickly is an important factor in ensuring that your readers do not get turned off from your site. So, if you have a lot of JavaScript or calculated logic inside your pages (or use Flash or other rich media extensively, even for simple tasks such as navigation controls), there are a number of readers who will find your pages through search engine results and then get turned off since the page takes too long to load (you would do well to consider your own behavior when you find a site that loads very slowly, or that has large images which take a long time to load, and then extrapolate the same behavior to your readers as well).
Here are some specific tools from Google that will help in evaluating your speed levels (link). Be sure to evaluate your page for both size and speed, and take a number of steps to reduce the time taken for such pages to be served to your readers (contrary to common misconception, your server / host capabilities is not the only factor, there are a number of other steps that can be taken to reduce the page loading times).
Google recently came out with a post (Google Blog) that talks about how Google is starting to use site speed as a factor in terms of ranking sites (and even though they significantly understate the implications of this change, one should be sure that it is going to be a factor that is more important when you challenge the more prominent search engine rankings).

You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.
Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

So, the point is clear. In addition to other factors, consider how fast your page loads as part of your checklist for Search Engine Optimization (and consider changing your SEO expert if they have not been asking you about page speeds – it is quite clear that they are not keeping up with SEO news). Use a number of tools for the same. Follow a number of steps:
1. Complex scripting is avoided or moved to a different location from it is downloaded (and maybe cached)
2. Keep the size of all components on a page such as images, videos, etc optimized
3. Move heavier objects off your site and onto other faster loading domains (such as images onto external sites that provide image hosting, videos converted to Flash and served from Youtube, etc)

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 34 – What happens when you have too much inline script code and CSS ..

ashish — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 09:29:39 +0000

The previous post talked about the use of frames (Frames and SEO) in your site, and how this impacts your SEO efforts and your ranking. In this post, we will talk about another common practice indulged in by a number of page owners, and which can impact their rankings. This is related to having scripting and CSS code inside their web pages, mixed with content. For some time now, a number of sites have been advocating that such scripting and CSS should be moved to linked files rather than inside the common page. In this post, I will explain the reasons for the same, and implications on Search Engine Optimization.
It may seem very convenient to put scripting code and CSS within pages (or use PHP server side functions to insert the code inside the page when the server is rendering the page). However, it causes problems to search engines. When you have all these content in the page content files, it causes the page to bloat up and the search engine crawler has to do more searching to find the actual content in the files (and you do want you actual content to be easily found by the search engines, not the ‘beautifully’ created code and CSS files that look like junk to the search engines). Given the amount of content that search engine crawlers have to go through (after all, they have to content the entire universe of content on the web), if a page seems very long and complicated and slow to search engine crawlers, they can very ignore such content and move on. You need to make it easier for them to find the relevant content in your pages. Further, the closer that content is to the start of your HTML page, the better (and when you have code and CSS that is present, it is typically above the content and hence likely to make it more difficult for your content to be found by the search engines).
What can you do ? Well, you can move all your script and CSS code to a separate file that is called from within your page. Of course, it does not mean that you need to take all your code and just move it to a file, there will need to be references to this file in the page; this will need to be done carefully and tested to make sure that it works and there was no slipup in the process of doing this. However, once it is done, then there are no further issues and the reader will be unable to make out any difference (unless the more technically interested reader looks the source of your file). And of course, such external files are also cached by some browsers, so if your readers frequently come to your site, the same files will not be loaded again and again and will enable faster loading.
One final advantage, and this is of benefit to you. If you keep your scripting code and CSS in a separate file that is being called by other pages, then any maintenance needed on your code or CSS is much easier and less messy.

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 33 – Using frames in your page is frowned upon as a part of SEO

ashish — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 06:34:02 +0000

In the previous post (rich content and SEO), we argued that rich content by itself, even though it may look attractive to a section of your users, can pose problems for SEO since search engine crawlers don’t know how to easily read and index rich content. In this post, we talk about the use of frames and its potential for improving or causing problems to your Search Engine ranking,
A lot of you may even wonder about what frames are, and why are we even talking about frames ? After all, when sites first came up, there was a huge push to use frames as a way to separate out different sections of your site, and keep some sections fixed while the user could wander around in the other sections of your site. And it was something new, something cool (keep in mind that I am talking about several years back). However, what is the scene today ? There are sites that have been created from earlier that are using this method, and their owners worry about why their sites still do not have a prominent place in search engine results.
Frames is considered by many to be a dead technology, since you can use CSS if you want to ensure stuff such as a corporate logo always being visible, or any other matter that you would always like the user to see even if everything else in the other frame is scrolling.
Why are frames considered bad ? The construction of frames is such that you have a structure that splits the page into a container which hosts the different frames, which seemingly act as separate pages. And search engines treat them like separate pages (with some search engines actually having difficulty in going beyond the container code and not being able to get to the individual pages contained in the frames – this has to do with the assembler frame actually referencing the included frames as a ‘src’ tag rather than a ‘href’ tag). Even those search engines that are able to index the pages within the frames do so without any reference to the framed structure of the page, and when somebody visits the page from a search engine result, they will actually lead directly to the page. When they reach such a page, they no longer have the frame within their browser, and may find navigation to other elements of the site as a big problem.
What is a solution to this ? Well, using the NOFRAMES tag is a solution, but it requires for you to place your content in a separate section marked by the Noframes tag and search engines will read this. However, this also means that you need to spend more effort to ensure that all your content is kept in a sort of duplicate mode, and I am sure that you could use other means of replicating the usefullness of frames and do more for Search Engine Optimization.

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 31 – Observing copyright law

ashish — Wed, 12 May 2010 18:07:39 +0000

Observing copyright law mean not seem relevant to a post on what is good Search Engine Optimization. And you might be thinking that with the need to get fresh content, what is wrong on taking some content from other sources and modifying them slightly in order to get fresh content for your site. However, keep in mind that Copyright Infringement can have serious legal issues, and if you are challenged, this can have pretty bad results for your site, and also on your rankings with search engine. So here goes some layman advice on Copyright Law (remember that for specific advice and queries on such a critical topic, you will need to consult a lawyer or expert and not depend on posts like this one). Here goes:
- You are allowed to quote sections from other posts or sites if these are meant for positive or negative acclaim, since this is covered under free speech
- However, for the above point, there are limitations. If you copy the main point of the other site or article, or copy huge sections of the other article, then it is beyond the fair use right and you are technically doing what some US courts have ruled as copyright violation
- There are many sites that allow the use of their material freely and you can use them in any way; however, keep in mind that just because a site or any kind of media does not have an explicit copyright, they are free to copy. Sites that allow free copy should have an explicit point stating so.
- You can even use company logos or names in your posts, subject to the same condition as above; you need to use them for acclaim or review; but you cannot use them for any kind of commercial purpose without approval from the owners of the company logos or names
- Quoting additional material from other sites beyond review fair use needs approval from the owners of the copyright
- There can be many different kinds of copyright notices, so you need to check about the kind of copyright notices that are present on the site from where you are planning to get content to ensure that you are doing the right thing
- If people come after you alleging copyright infringement, then you can be in serious trouble; especially if they come after all your hosting service or going after search engines where your site is ranked
- Hence, be very careful about the type of content you are using from other sites, do not look at this content as a way of filling your content needs; only use content under fair use