I’ve been across a couple of ways that you can increase your search engine visibility. I’m not an SEO expert. I’m merely exposing what I’ve learn in the last months. If you don’t know, I had a drop of 50% of traffic from search engine when moving from Wordpress to BlogEngine.NET. Mostly due because of me. I have now deployed my blog with a lot of improvements on keywords, titles and descriptions. But there is some other ways your site or blog can be affected. Here are some tips I’ve used to optimize my search engine visibility.
Subscribe to Google Webmaster tools or other search engines and submit your sitemap
Creating a sitemap for Google is like telling Google everything you have on your website. Some page may not be accessible via normal crawling so it’s a way of telling Google everything that should be indexed.
Check your website with an SEO analyser
This will help you see your site with another eye. The best online analysers I’ve found are Website Grader web site and SEOmoz. Both are good looking and provide useful tips to increase your web site traffic. If you are using IIS, another tool to check out, is the SEO toolkit.
Launch Without Comments (and Add Them Later)
I’ve taken this advice from the 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic post and it’s not as bad as it seems. I, myself, did fall for this one. Many times I’ve not subscribed to a blog, because of its lack of comments.
One h1 tag by page and use the headings tag wisely
Many people think it is not as important as it appears, but I think the h1 tag is utterly important. The h1 tag should be used to put emphasis on the content of the page. I’ve used them primary to contain a relevant title for the page. Use h1 to h6 tags wisely to properly separate the content of the page, like a book. Think about reader without a visual browser (usability).
Remove broken links
Removing broken links prove to search engine that you care about your content and their will re-crawl your site. It also means that you care about your readers and it’s a good thing. Other that with the SEO toolkit, you can use the W3C Link Checker to find any broken links.
Provide great content
Probably the greatest advice ever. Your site is nothing if you don’t have great content that is relevant. I’ve found this Blogsessive post to be interesting. And if you need to become a better writer, check out The Day You Became A Better Writer.
Use the description meta tag
Don’t forget to add a description meta tag. Did you ever where the description under a link from the list of results from a Google search came from? Providing accurate description will help ensure that the user won’t be disappointed when visualizing your web page.
Verify the length of the description and title meta tags
To avoid your tile being cropped by search engines, you should have titles that have less than 64 characters including spaces and more than 5 characters. The description should be between 25 and 150 characters according to the SEO toolkit.
Use the ALT attribute on images and an accurate filename
Search engines cannot see images. If you want them to know what the image is about, you need to add an ALT attributes to your images. Even better, name your image to reflect what they really are.