Customer Street SEO Articles & Help

Here are five very important things to consider and spend time on when designing a website or giving it an overhaul that the major search engines look at when ranking a website. There are over 200 different signals that Google looks for when ranking a site. I have documented five that need to be followed and mastered to get the most from your site on the SERPs.

Title Tags:

probably provide the biggest time to benefit ratio. While you should consider your title tags carefully, it still doesn’t require a whole lot of time to craft a 65 character title. If you know what the focus of any given page is then you make sure your title contains those “key words” along with other enticing information for the visitor.

Headings:

are another easy thing to utilize that can provide the search engines some strong signals as to the overall content of your page. While it isn’t always necessary, I strongly recommend using proper heading tags and be sure to keep all your headings organized as you would an outline for a term paper. In other words there should only be one H1 tag and your H3 should not supersede your first H2. Keep things in proper hierarchal context and you’ll do fine.

Content:

takes time, but like the title tag, it is hugely important. Without content, the search engines don’t know what your page is really about, only what others say (see the Links below) about it. There is no magic number of words or keyword usage ratio that you should have to focus on, but you do need to write using your keywords and make sure the content is valuable for your site visitors.

Links:

allow the search engines to know not just what you say your pages are about but what others say about them. In very crude terms, more links mean your page is more valuable and links that reinforce your page topic tells the engines that your page is a valuable resource for that topic. In many cases the search engines place more weight on what other sites are saying via their links to your page, than what you are saying on your page, but both links and on-page content should reinforce each other. Imagine a link is a recommendation and you wont go far wrong.

Website Architecture:

also speaks volumes about what pages of your site you feel are more important, or have the best content. A poorly implemented website structure can be one of the fastest ways to inadvertently tell the search engine spiders that they are unwanted. There is no easier way to lose all your site rankings than to screw up your robots.txt file.

Conclusion::

These are just the first five things that I thought of as important off the top of my head. I’m certain some will disagree with this list or would have put swapped one of my items for something different. My point here wasn’t to create an all-important list but to provide some insight as to a few things that should be considered as more valuable in terms of time and benefit. I will add to this list so keep coming back for more. I will add a new Google signal each week.

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