In Search Engine Optimization (SEO), content is still the best way to rank for given keywords for your online store. However, if you’re lacking copywriting skills, but are familiar with web development, then you can start by optimizing the code.
Here are some things you can tweak on the back-end:
- Meta Data: This is one of the more important things that you can optimize. Meta data is everything after the <header> tags and before the <body> tags. You’ll find the following:
- Title: These are crawled by the search engines and actually have a big impact on your ranking, it is best to include keywords in the first 30 characters of the title, while limiting it to just 60 letters.
- Meta Description: Not just an area to optimize for keywords, you can also use the meta descriptions to increase visitors to your website. Make the copy relevant and compelling to encourage more people to click on the listing on through to your website.
- Meta Keywords: Though this doesn’t bear as much weight as it did 3 or 4 years ago, it won’t hurt to still add your keywords here. Some search engines still look at it.
- Headers: You should also utilize the header tags <h1> to <h6> to highlight the keywords. The search engines are going to see these as the most important words to focus on in the body of your webpage.
- Fonts: Enhancement options such as bold, italics and underline also make the search engines pay more attention to your keywords.
- Alt Tags: Search Engines don’t translate images, but one way for you to have them “read” it is by adding keyword alt tags. Plus, it will help you comply better with usability standards.
- Link Anchor Text: Use keywords in anchor text you use for internal linking. While it may not serve as optimization for the page that you are currently working on, it can help optimize your deeper pages.
Those are just some examples of how you can optimize your code. In the wider perspective, we also recommend using Cascading Style Sheets or CSS. This reduces your content-to-code ratio, giving you the ability to put in more text than coded lines in your page source. Additionally, CSS can also help you place your content higher in the code than other elements, making it seem more important to search engines.
As an extension to this article, it could be helpful to also address keyword density and duplicate content. These areas may be more on the "front end" than "back end," and still useful for site owners or managers to know. Thanks for the tips.
Posted by: Heather Rast | June 24, 2010 at 08:31 AM