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My purpose is to raise my company's website up in the search rankings. Our website has been up for several years now, let's just say 6. For the first few years, our website came up on the first page of the results under our main keywords. (I've only been starting to work here recently so I've been told of all this) Now, for the past year or 2 (or 3), our website is nowhere to be found on at least the first 25 pages of results from the major SEs (namely, Google, Yahoo!, MSN) under the same keywords. So, about 4 months ago, I did my homework and did some preliminary changes to try to get the site up on top again. Here is a list of all the changes I've made:
- Changed titles to be more attracting to visitors and to include some keywords in there
- Reworded the META description
- Reworked the META keywords
- Made sure text links were prominent on the page and that graphics weren't "covering" them up
- Made sure graphics have ALT tags with them
I know there's a few important things that I did not do but I had some questions about those:
- Incoming links: what's the best way to get those? Just find one of the big sites in our industry and request for a link exchange?
- Content: a few of our main pages already have quite a bit of relevant content on them. But they aren't listed in the SEs as the top pages in those keywords (and one of those keywords is not very competitive at all) Our homepage is basically a gateway to explore all the different other pages on our site. My question is: is it really necessary to have quite a bit of relevant content on our main page even to get our other pages deeper in noticed on our website? I do know that our pages definitely has been indexed; they're just not showing up on top under certain searches.
- Site Map: I've read quite a bit of discussions regarding this on these forums, but I did not really come up to a clear conclusion whether or not this is necessary or not for SEO. If it helps, then I will spend some time sprucing it up or use the Google BETA one. I just don't want to be spending any time that's deemed unworthy for my purpose.
So yeah, I think that's all I have to say. If I missed something, feel free to add any more additional recommendations you might have. I could definitely use some help from my fellow webmasters here! :)
It sounds like the your site's conent is ok but could use some work. If that is the case you should spend 90% of your time on link development. I bet you haven't gotten links in a very long time. Get some inbound links, then get some more inbound links and then get even more inbound links. You should be getting new links every week.
Please don't ask how to get links. Please read the Link Development [webmasterworld.com] section. Make sure to read the old posts, they give alot of great suggestions. Good luck :)
For incoming links, go for one way ling rather going for link exchange(reciprocal links).
Rich Content and one way incoming links are very important from seo point of view.
Sitemap has nothing to do with optimization, it is helpful for visitor to access the overview of your website.
Sitemap has nothing to do with optimization
I have to disagree a little here...
If you consider having pages indexed, so they can be found in SEs, website optimization (I do, I think it is one of the most important parts) a site map can be very helpful.
It can keep you within '3 clicks to any page' as suggested by MSN. They can help SEs find pages that are not heavily linked to within the site. They can be focused on specific directory or topics, so when an SE Spider visits that part of the site they can find the rest of the information you have on a topic. They can help with deep page indexing. And on, and on...
I highly recommend them, and believe they are definitely part of SEO.
Justin
