Pleasanton Web Design

1. Build incoming links. No kidding. Build incoming links. It’s hard to do, and can be extremely time consuming and tedious, but keep at it. If you wonder why your site still has a PageRank of 2 and isn’t showing up in your competitive searches, it’s because you have not built enough incoming links.

2. Redirect yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com (or visa versa). If you don’t, search engines will see both URLs as separate websites and you could get duplicate content penalties. Type site:yourdomain.com in the Google search box. Then type site:www.yourdomain.com in the Google search box. If you have a different number of links, or different links indexed, Google thinks you have two different websites with the same content.

3. Don’t point links to your index page. Point them all to your domain. That includes your internal navigation.

4. Use Google Webmaster Tools to flag any errors in site structure, tags, redirects or indexing. The most useful tools, in my opinion are the robots.txt analysis tool and the URL Removal Tool. Also of note are the sitemap submission tool and diagnostics that tell you if you have 404 errors, or if there are problems with URLs in your sitemap.

5. Leave your company name out of your page title and h1 tags. Chances are that searches for your company name are insignificant in your overall search engine ranking strategy, and you are diluting your keyword relevance.

6. Make sure that all of your page titles are different, and are targeted to the content of the page. Having 20 pages titled “custom widgets” doesn’t make the search engines think that your website is the place to learn about custom widgets. It makes them think that users will have a hard time finding information on your site.

7. Use search engine functions to monitor the pages of your website that are indexed. Spiders don’t always obey robots.txt, so you can end up with a lot of garbage in the index if you don’t keep on top of it. This is especially important if you have a dynamic website.

8. Add new content on a regular basis. Search engines think big websites are important websites, and keeping it fresh keeps them coming back.