Even while off-site factors may be far more significant today in achieving high rankings, on-site factors are not to be neglected.
Making sure that the code of your blog / site is SEO-friendly is still a very important step. As you maybe using a ready-made template for Wordpress or other CMS, here's a quick tip to make sure that it is not doing harm to your positions in the search results.
You can watch a video presentation of the tips described below (opens in a new window)
What you will need
- Firefox browser (you should be using it anyway, I guess), and
- One of the most useful extensions ever created, called Web Developer.
How to test your template
Open the site using a template that you want to check.
The first step is to display the entire content without any CSS formatting.
On the Web Developer toolbar, find the following function: CSS -> Disable Styles -> All Styles. Alternatively, you can also press Ctrl + Shift +S.
Now it's time for you to evaluate how the content is organized without any formatting. Ideally, you want all your most important content as much to the top of the page as possible, with all the extra information (menus, archives, categories, etc.) in the bottom (even if they appear at the top with full formatting).
If you see that your content has to compete for top space with less relevant items, or even worse, it's mixed and hidden in nested tables, you may be better looking for another template.
You're looking for something like this:
You will also want to check if the template is using header tags properly to indicate titles of your articles (when you place your keywords among header tags, they gain more weight than in the body of the posts).
Web Developer extension will be helpful in this case as well.
On WD toolbar, navigate to Information -> View Document Outline.
Ideally, you should see something similar to:
As you can see, all titles are between H2 tags and the content of the page is nicely structured.
Other check points
Obviously, there are more things that can affect your rankings. One of the most important thing is the proper use of the title tag.
You really want to include the title of each article/post, with your most important keywords, in the title of the page. To see if that's how your template works, you can use any browser - just have a look at the title bar of the browser window.
No comments:
Post a Comment