Establishing a Website Domain Name

Establishing a website domain name and a high PageRank on Google takes significant time, efforts and commitment. There are several factors that improve your search rankings and the Google PageRank. Two most important factors are, doing proper on-page optimization and site structuring, and getting substantial amount of high ranking relevant sites linking to yours.

For new websites it is a big challenge to get other leading sites in the industry linking to theirs. However, even those sites which have been around and doing business for years; their low rankings are an outcome of the lack of work, awareness, skills, or resources to implement the right optimization and link strategies.

There are several cases where a client with a strong domain presence and high PageRank, has not been able to get top rankings for the most desired search terms, while sites with much lower PageRank outranked them. One of my clients had this issue. They had been in business for years with a strong online presence in their community and several links from high authority sites to theirs. Despite that they struggled to get top rankings for several of their key terms, while newer sites with less content and few incoming links outranked.

Website Navigation Structure

The entire website and navigation structure, anchor texts, meta tags, page headers, etc. of this clients site were in a mess. They had tons of content which was not optimized and categorized properly. There were absolutely no in-links while URL’s were too long to fit in a browser window. So much was required to be done on building a robust site structure, and as usual the client wanted results fast.

After analyzing the root cause of the problem, I chose to start working on doing the most important factors first, aiming at the low-hanging fruits. I started working on the on-page factors replacing poor anchor text with keyword rich links pointing to the appropriate pages besides other things that required least efforts with immediate gains. The result – search results started appearing sooner not just for the top key terms but also for several long-tail keyords, which were unknown till now.

When you are working on a new website it is much easier to begin everything the right way, however, most of us in the SEO industry inherit sites which have massive content with poor optimization. And this is the obvious reason why site owners turn to us to get things done right and fast. We can not complain – it is our job!

Follow Web Standards – Put the Right Codes

When it comes to SEO, the simplest thing we must do is to develop / re-design website following the latest web standards, i.e., cleaning up the bad codes and assigning right ones – for example,

• proper use of meta tags and page headers (the H1 page header should be just one per page)
• each page should have a unique title that reflects the content of that page and should be located immediately after the opening head code not after some bits of html or JavaScript codes
• title should be followed by description tag, followed by meta keywords tags, and then everything else, and so on.

Write for Human Visitors, Not Just Search Engine Robots

Search engines want us to design and develop pages keeping our human readers in mind. Following the latest web standards ensures that our pages are developed both for people as well as search engine robots. When you have all the elements at right places, you get credit for the right words (keywords). Messy html confuses the search engines and does not help in proper indexing. Improper indexing means improper rankings.

There are several factors at work when it comes to optimizing websites, improving internet marketing and online campaigns. Putting all that in one article is not possible. For this reason, I have split the content into smaller articles for easy comprehension and use. Keep looking for the other parts of this series to learn more about these factors to improve your websites and their search rankings.