Every ship needs a captain to help it reach its destination. Similar is the case with a website that seeks to reach its prospects, or better say, target audience. It also needs an experienced hand to captain it while being shrouded by confusions arising from competition and ‘must follow’ SEO imperatives.
I, as your SEO consultant is that experienced ‘captain’ who can guide you to reach your destination faster. My SEO consultancy support includes of following services:
Coordination with Design and Development
1. Guiding developers/designers to ensure SEO friendly coding/designing of the website
I would suggest the designer and the HTML resource to code site pages in a way that not only helps the site pages to load faster but render it is easy for search engine crawlers (complex Search Engine programs that read the website and store in Search Engine databases) to index the pages faster.
2. Working with the coders to create Search Engine friendly sitemaps
A Sitemap is a page that includes the list of all the pages of a website, along with their links, all in one place. Acting as Index of the entire website, Sitemap works as an easy reference point for Search Engine crawlers to register all pages of a site.
SEO activities to optimize the site for Search Engines
1. Creating title & metadata for all category, subcategory and general pages (home, contact us, shopping cart, general info etc.)
Title & metadata tags play one of the most important roles in optimizing a website. They not only help Search Engines to understand what exactly a page is about, but also, guide visitors of a page to estimate the utility of a site without opening it. Search Engines index title and metadata and display them as the headline with ‘Search Engine Ranking Page’ (SERP) listings along with a description of the webpage.
2. Fixing absolute path in all links to the home page
The service helps in repositioning index links on all pages of the website to point towards the domain.
3. Optimizing content on the pages
Search Engines return search results in the exact order of their perceived relevancy to the search phrase requested. Sprinkled with keywords, the web page content should be strategically used to convey the search engine that your web page really contains information relevant to the keyword in focus. I shall suggest implementing promotional content (max 100 -150 words) in the category and sub category page, which I shall optimize for keyword density and prominence.
4. Submitting sitemaps to Search Engine
Creating, implementing and submitting Sitemaps in major search engine e.g. Google, Yahoo, Bing/Live. Sitemaps are important for making sure that your site can be crawled completely and indexed by the search engines. I would develop Sitemaps that are specific to the functioning of Search Engines e.g. TXT Sitemap for Yahoo and XML for Google.
5. Creating webmaster accounts in major search engines (Google, Yahoo & MSN)
Webmaster accounts gives information about website links, top search queries, and various errors (crawling related errors on the site, sitemap errors, HTTP errors, URL not found, URL restricted by robots.txt, unreachable URL’s etc.) which can be rectified to improve the accessibility to a site by major Search Engines.
6. Implementing Google Analytics code on the website pages to track traffic and maintain the visitor’s history.
Google Analytics helps you find out many vital information about your site’s performance in terms of attracting visitors, their geographical locations, capability of site in retaining them, performance of site pages and keywords targeted there in etc. in addition to various other tools to set and realize goal in an effective manner. By providing an overall count on the traffic stats, page views, content, keywords etc. Google Analytics help you structure your website better as per the essentials. I help you implement and harness from this highly useful tool.
7. Resolving canonical issue on the site
Websites that can be accessed both with www and without www, before the domain name, face the problem of being penalized by Search Engines for being recognized as two different identities. In such cases, Search Engines consider the site with www, and without www, as two different identities and treat them individually. Since both have same content, may penalize both of them under content duplicity. This canonical problem can be resolved by setting rules in htaccess (in case of apache server only). This is a part of server-end optimization and would not effect in any visible change on the site.
8. Manual submission in Search Engines and directories
Submission in Search Engines and directories helps a site to get faster indexed by the search engines, especially so if the site is newly launched. I approach only the respected directories and corresponding appropriate categories/subcategories of that site to submit site detail. Manual submission works as a better way of submission compared to Automatic/robotic submissions, as human eyes can keep a better check of the directory category and edit the descriptions as per the keyword, as and when required, while submitting site detail to a directory.
9. Suggestions and recommendation on further promotion of the website to help it rank amongst top search results with a definitive set of keywords
All along the normal progression of the project, I shall send you suggestions on the continued promotion of the website in major Search Engines.