{"id":414,"date":"2015-06-29T20:06:42","date_gmt":"2015-06-29T20:06:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/support\/?page_id=414"},"modified":"2015-07-29T05:21:09","modified_gmt":"2015-07-29T05:21:09","slug":"search-engine-optimization","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/support\/web-space\/search-engine-optimization\/","title":{"rendered":"Search Engine Optimization"},"content":{"rendered":"

Search Engine Optimization<\/span><\/p>\n

Search Optimization Companies<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As soon as your site is visible on the net you no doubt will experience <\/span>a deluge of e-mail from companies purporting to be Search Engine <\/span>Optimization specialists. I urge you to consider some things before giving <\/span>your hard earned cash to these companies.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The spammers have not been successful at optimizing their own <\/span>sites for search engines. If they had, they wouldn’t use spam to drum up <\/span>business. Plenty of clients would have found them via their websites.\u00a0 If you do decide to employ a search engine optimization firm, I suggest you search for them with Google and choose amongst the highest in the results.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Content<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Content is still King but other factors are significant. If you link to <\/span>sites which are not relevant to your content, or if sites not relevant to your content link to yours, search engines consider <\/span>your site to be low quality and reduces your ranking.\u00a0 If a site that is not relevant links to yours, you can use Google Webmaster Tools<\/a> to tell Google to ignore that link.
\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Since the goals of most major search engines is to provide the customer <\/span>with the most relevant and desirable sites, make your site attractive to <\/span>humans. Use complete well-formed sentences and paragraphs.\u00a0 Make sure that images have proper alt tags describing them.
\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Organize your site so there is a reasonable number of links on each <\/span>page. You don’t want too many links on one page but you also don’t want<\/span> to force users to go too deep to find the content they seek.\u00a0 As far as depth, I try to not have more than 5-10 items on a menu, and then as many layers of depth as necessary to accommodate the content within that context, keeping the most important content as near to the entry page as possible.
\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Because few readers will read past the first hundred kilobytes of a <\/span>document, search engines tend to rank keywords in the top part of the <\/span>document higher. For this reason, it is a good idea to use external J<\/span>avaScript pages and external stylesheets.\u00a0 Another advantage of using external stylesheets and JavaScript is that if the same code is used on more than one page, it only needs to be loaded once by the browser and then accessed from cache for additional pages.
\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Search engines also tend to rank keywords found in the title, filename, <\/span>and domain name more highly than keywords found elsewhere. Keywords found <\/span>in larger text with larger fonts tend to get weighted more heavily as well as those found in <\/span><h1> through <h6> tags with heavier ranking going to the lower <\/span>numbers.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Most search engines can not index images, video, audio, or flash <\/span>content. Google does have some ability to index flash and images. You <\/span>should make sure to use descriptive alt tags with any images. This is <\/span>important not only for search engines but also for visually impaired <\/span>users.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Mobile Friendly<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Because that approximately 40% of traffic that comes to websites today originates from mobile devices such as smart phones, tablets, and phablets, Google now penalizes sites which are not mobile friendly when searches originate from a mobile device.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There are basically three approaches to mobile friendliness.\u00a0 The first is to create an entirely separate website for mobile devices, commonly with a ‘.mobi’ domain extension.\u00a0 The second is to dynamically serve pages with different mark up depending upon the device.\u00a0 The third is to make the site responsive by using media queries to serve different CSS code depending upon the device originating the request.\u00a0 It is also important to set the view port, otherwise small high resolution devices like the I-phones with their retina display will display text and buttons too small to read or operate.<\/span><\/p>\n

Site Maps<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 You can help search engines find what is relevant to index by creating a sitemap which is an xml file describing your site.\u00a0 For a hand coded site there are numerous scripts available that you can run from cron periodically.\u00a0 For a WordPress site, WordPress maintains an atom and rss feed automatically at the URLs yoursite.com\/feed\/<\/span> and yoursite.com\/feed\/atom\/<\/span> respectively.\u00a0 However, you can also get plugins that create a standard sitemap.xml file.\u00a0 You can get plugins that create several sitemap files based upon different aspects of your website and then provide a sitemapindex.xml file.\u00a0 In Google Web Master tools<\/a>, under the Crawl section, there is a subsection for Sitemaps where you can submit sitemaps.\u00a0 Doing so will insure that your content gets indexed promptly and more thoroughly than relying on a spider to come along and crawl your site.<\/span><\/p>\n

Links<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Incoming links should be from relevant sites otherwise search engines <\/span>will penalize you for link spamming. Outbound links should be to relevant <\/span>sites otherwise search engines will consider your site low quality and <\/span>penalize you. Avoid link farms like the plague. They might give you a <\/span>temporary boost but once discovered search engines will severely penalize <\/span>your site. The type of links you want are those that come naturally from <\/span>good content.<\/span><\/p>\n

Social Media<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 You can expand your sites reach and engage more viewers by tying your site in with social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, PinInterest, and others.\u00a0 There are WordPress plugins that both allow automatic posting to these sites as well as automatic inclusion of content from these sites.<\/span><\/p>\n

Be Honest<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Show search engines the same content you show everyone else. They will <\/span>penalize you if they think you are trying to fool them into thinking your <\/span>site is something it is not.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Maintain Your Site<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Make sure you don’t have incomplete links or broken HTML or CSS code. <\/span>We have an excellent tool on shellx which will crawl your website and find <\/span>any broken links. It is is called KLinkStatus and is a graphical <\/span>application so you need to use a remote desktop<\/a> to use it. It is located at <\/span>Applications->Programming->KLinkStatus.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 To check your site for syntactical correctness, I suggest you utilize <\/span>the W3 validator at http:\/\/validator.w3.org\/<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I suggest you code your site in HTML5<\/a>. It is <\/span>easier to code and more capable than earlier versions of HTML and XML. <\/span>For now I suggest avoiding new tags like <header>, <footer>,<\/span><\/span>
\n <section>, and <article> and stick to generic <div> and <\/span><span> tags when you can get the same functionality, even if the <\/span>code is less readable, in order to maintain backward compatibility with<\/span><\/span>
\n older browsers and pass HTML5 validation.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The goal is to make your site technically correct, device independent, <\/span>and attractive to as wide of an audience as possible. If search engines <\/span>determine that your site is high quality and likely to be viewable across <\/span>a wide swatch of browers, they are likely to score it higher.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Meta Data<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Some search engines ignore meta data entirely, others give index<\/span>nothing but meta data, and others correlate meta data to content and give <\/span>you a better ranking of your meta data accurately describes your content. <\/span>Use meta data but use it wisely, make sure keywords in your meta data are <\/span>found in the content and accurately reflect that content.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Search Engine Optimization Search Optimization Companies \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As soon as your site is visible on the net you no doubt will experience a deluge of e-mail from companies purporting to be Search Engine Optimization specialists. I urge you to consider … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":377,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"showcase.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-414","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","wpautop"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/support\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/support\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/support\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/support\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/support\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/support\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/414\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/support\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eskimo.com\/support\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}