After you have gone through the process of carefully selecting your keywords and optimizing your content, you can sit back and watch your rankings shoot through the roof, right? Not necessarily. Your content is optimized, but do the search engines have the proper tools to find and index your content? The following are some of the oft-overlooked items that prepare your site for optimal indexing by the search engines.

Optimized Internal Linking

This process is sometimes referred to as siloing and is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization.  Optimized internal linking is important, not only from a search engine standpoint, but from a usability standpoint.  Internal linking is an important way of directing the search engines to your most important pages.  The pages that are linked to the most, the search engines deem as the most important.  Also, linking to relevant pages from within your content allows users to easily find the content that should naturally progress them through your site.

Make Unique Titles and Descriptions

The search engines are all about unique content.  They attempt to weed out duplicate pages in order to provide unique and relevant results.  As a result, if a search engine comes across two pages that have the same page title or META description, there is a good chance that one of the pages will get passed over by the search engines, despite the content that actually appears on the page.  Writing good HTML titles and META tags can not only improve your search engine rankings, but it can also increase the amount of clicks that your search result gets by enticing the potential visitor.  Making sure that your pages have unique titles and descriptions is a great way to improve your chances of getting all of your relevant pages indexed into the search engines.

Write Unique Page Content

As mentioned earlier, the search engines don’t like copied or duplicated content.  If there is a discrepancy between duplicate content, the search engines will almost always use the original source as their top result.  If your site uses product feeds for its descriptions or if you copied your content from another site, it will be extremely difficult to get that page indexed by the search engines, much less achieve a high ranking for that page.  The search engines understand that not every word or phrase is going to be unique, so they give a small amount of leeway, but not much.  As such, it is recommended that each page contain around 70% unique content.  This allows for a quote that appears elsewhere, or a list of product specs that cannot be changed or altered.  If these items must appear on your site, it is imperative that you balance the copied content out with around 70% unique content.

Clean up Your Site’s Coding

The content that the user sees visually is often entirely different than the content that the search engines see when they spider your site.  This means that the spiders must filter through all of the coding on your site including page styling, JavaScript, and image filenames.  Much of the information contained in your coding is irrelevant to the search engines and can serve as a major distraction to the spiders when they visit your site.  Fortunately, much of the coding that hinders the spiders can be referenced externally such as external JavaScript or containing your site’s styling in .CSS files.  This will allow the search engines to quickly access and index the keyword rich content that you really want them to find.

When using proper search engine optimization techniques in conjunction with preparing your site for the search engines, you will be able to see the maximum results for your effort.

The Almighty Title Tag

While it might seem that the page Title Tags and Meta Tags aren’t very important, it’s quite the opposite.  Most notably, the Title Tag is arguably the most influential on-site component of the search engine’s algorithms.  If you want to rank for a keyword phrase, it should be in your Title Tag.

The Meta Tags are much less effective because of heavy spamming in the late 1990’s, but are still an important component that should not be overlooked.

Your rankings will not only be affected by doing your tags the right way, but doing them the wrong way could cause lead to problems that are easy to avoid.

So…what is a Title Tag?

A Title Tag is essentially one of the most important components to your site’s rankings other than the content itself (and of course the quality links that you’ve acquired as well).

If you want to achieve high search engine rankings, it is recommended that you fix your title tags to make them not only unique, but also to optimize them for the terms you wish to rank well for.

The Title Tag is what shows up at the top of a browser and what also appears within the results of the search engines - that notorious clickable link on the search engine results page - when listing the top ranked sites.  With just the fix of your site’s Title Tags, you are sure to receive appreciable differences among your rankings. 
 
 Title Tags should contain keyword phrases that you wish to receive desirable rankings for.  You can include, and it is recommended, that you include your company name within each Title Tag – preferably at the end of the Title Tag.  You will receive better results if your targeted keyword phrase is placed toward the beginning of the Title Tag rather than leaving that open to insert your company name.

Most importantly, make sure that your Title Tags are relevant to the copy found on the page each Title Tag is intended for.  You should not be writing a Title Tag about basketballs if the page you are writing it for only features baseball equipment.  However, it is imperative that you refrain from copying a string of text found from the content of that page into the Title Tag.  As mentioned above, each Title Tag should be of unique, well-optimized content.

Brittany Passante
Search Engine Optimization Manager