Initial website optimization

Many SEOs starting to promote their site only by optimizing landing page leaving other site parts without proper attention. And later, they found that their site is stuck on the same position, and even if they spend a lot of money to promote site, nothing is happening. What are the possible reasons of this situation?

Not always external factors and the size of the reference budget resolves all problems. First of all you need to make search engines understand that your site is good. Even more - it is ideal. To do so, all the internal factors should be rechecked and optimized for reaching the ideal logical state.

Several times we have seen the situation, when everything seems to be all right, but position of the site stays permanent no matter what. The most common possible reason for this issue is that search engine has found some errors on your site. Therefore it is necessary to hide this errors from the “all-seeing eye" of the search engine.

The list below consists only from the most important tasks which should be completed to finish initial optimization:

1. Title

Title must be unique and optimized not only for your landing page but also for all others pages on your site. After all, GWT have an entire section of HTML errors examples, which was created to help SEOs. Possible different ways to create unique page title: if you have small site you can change page titles by yourself; if you have massive web shop it is easier to set up title automatic creation. Keywords should be moved to the beginning of the title and if it is possible title should not be longer than 12 words

2. Description

Similarly to the title, meta descriptions also must be unique. At the same time description need to be relevant to your keywords (requests)

3. Headers H1-H6

The header tags must be arranged in order: H1, H2, H2, H3, etc. Header tag H1 should only appear once per page. There is already an undeniable fact that the fewer words in the title, the more weight is transferred using keyword, so H1 tag should be used for very precise and useful phrase.

4. Absolute and relative hyper-links

For all landing pages you should use only absolute internal links. All outgoing links should be relative so the internal page size was permanent.

5. Gluing and redirects

Pay attention to how search engines index your site. If your site is indexed with the prefix and the WWW is available for opening without the prefix, it is strongly recommended to put a 301 redirect from the domain without the WWW, on a domain with a given prefix. Also make sure is your site available on pages index.php (main.php), index.html (index.htm), if it is, also create an 301 redirect to the root directory of the site. Often search engines indexes sites in different ways: one with the WWW, and the other without. But in this case is up to you, which search engine you prefer.

6. Site Map

To improve indexing of your site we recommend you generate site maps, as HTML and XML. It is recommended to insert some external links into HTML sites map so that it have a weight which it will share with other pages - this will increase traffic on the low frequency requests

7. Missing documents and broken links

To prevent additional errors in the search engines, you need to check website for broken links and missing documents. To make it easier you can automate this process by using one of the software which in the wide range can be found On-line

8. robots.txt

You need to pay special attention on the robots.txt file, very important to setup it correctly. Do not close accidentally important site parts, recheck syntaxis. It is recommended to close access for following: sorting and log in page / registration, profiles, polls / voting, internal directories on which can slip references, all sections, intended only for the user and all branches of the site, which have been duplicated and created only for comfortable use.

It is a short list of tasks which will make you a one step closer to the fully optimized web site