Category Archives: Web Design Blog

The following are the five basic optimization techniques we use on every website. These ensure that your site adheres to the standards that search engines look for when it’s indexing a site.

There are always more advanced and costlier methods, but we start with these free tricks to lay the foundation and can scale up the operation based on how aggressive you want to be.

1. Google’s Keyword Tool

Before we begin any optimization work, we need to know what people are searching for and how they will find you. We use Google’s Keyword tool to research keywords that match your product/sales goals.

For example: if you’re selling iPhone cases, you might consider using the phrases “cell phone covers,” “cellphone cases” or “iphone cases” in your product descriptions. They are all different phrases for the same thing, but without any research you wouldn’t know the huge difference in results you could have based solely on naming conventions:

cell phone covers cell phone cases iphone cases
14,800 searches 246,000 searches 1,830,000 searches
Once you know the keywords people are using to search for things, you can use your findings across the entirety of the site to ensure that people searching for that phrase will find you.

2. Page URL Structure

After researching and pinpointing the keywords you want to gear your website towards, we take the keywords and use them in the page urls. For my Web Design business that is located in Santa Barbara, I would use something like “http://dejalane.com/santa-barbara-web-design”. Google stops indexing URLs after a certain amount of characters so you can’t cram every keyword into every URL, but if it’s something relevant to the page you should include it in the URL. The URL also helps inform users about the structure of the site, so we take that into consideration as well.

3. Headline Text

Google scans each page looking for header text, with the assumption that the headers hold relevant keywords to outline what the page is about. H1/Heading 1 text is given highest value, followed by H2 and H3, etc.

Heading 1 Text

Heading 2 Text

Heading 3 Text

Heading 4 Text

Once you know the keywords you want to use to target your intended audience, we try to include them in the heading titles so that they are found in both the page URL and again within the body of the page/article. Reinforcing the main keywords shows that the page is content-rich.

4. Cross-Linking

By cross-linking between areas of your site, you are helping guide users to other areas of content that might be relevant to the viewer. You can create cross-links by linking blog posts within your own site, have other sites link to you in exchange for you linking to theirs, add Facebook posts that link to your site or just add a link to your site on other pages when you write articles or comments. Search engines value pages that are referenced and linked to more, because their popularity makes them seem more relevant.

5. Image Titles

Make sure that you save images with keywords in the file name and give them alt text when you upload them so that Google and other devices can scan the images for keywords. Search engines have the same issue that blind people would have, they can’t read images! So you have to help them by including them in file names and alt text.

From Google’s Webmaster guidelines:

Images: Use the alt attribute to provide descriptive text. In addition, we recommend using a human-readable caption and descriptive text around the image.