SEOer must overlook these factors

When anybody encounters an SEO campaign, it is usually done to optimize your website to appear in the highest position possible in SERPs. There are tons of techniques and tips to use to do so for both on-page and off-page optimization. Everybody concentrates and focuses so hard on the big factors that they seem to forget about the smaller ones. These smaller factors usually have a big long term effect on your optimization and if you forget them, it may cause you some problems in your campaign. I will be giving you the main techniques and tips people usually tend to forget.

Quality Inbound Links

Quality inbound links is the #1 way to rank higher in SERPs. Many SEO experts try so hard to get as many backlinks as they can to their web sites but most of the time they come from irrelevant and low quality websites. Remember that inbound links act like votes so you want to get them from high quality websites. Having 100 links from a low quality website isn’t worth as much as 1 link from an established website. Make sure that your inbound links come from quality websites that are relevant to your everyday business.

Website Speed

Everybody seems surprised when you say this, but yes, your website’s speed does play a role to increase your rankings in SERPs. Google themselves stated it not to0 long ago. Make sure that your website’s loading speed is fast enough and make sure you fully optimize it for speed (get a good hosting company). A good way to increase your website’s speed is by giving it a good and organized structure by using CSS to design your website. Using CSS will facilitate the crawling and the indexing of your website. I wrote an article on how does CSS improve your SEO, go check it out.

Canonization

People tend to forget this technique the most. Whenever you start a new website, you usually have more than one homepage. What I mean by this is that you may have:

www.example.com, example.com, www.example.com/index.html, example.com/index.html etc…
All these URLs link to the same page which is your home page. This can be seen by search engines as duplicate content. To avoid this, add the “rel=canonical” tag. This tag will tell the search engine that no matter which home page URL he falls on, the one in the tag is the proper one. Here’s how to do it:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.mysite.com/” />

 

Another thing that people usually forget to do is a 301 redirect. A website can always be accessed either by the domain itself “example.com or “www.example.com”. Search engines see these as 2 different versions of URLs. So it is important to redirect the one you do not want to the version you want to appear. Here’s how to redirect the “non-www” version to the “www” version:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Optimizing Anchor Texts

Getting quality inbound links is very important, but without a proper anchor text, your link loses a lot of value. The anchor text is the clickable part of the link. Like I stated earlier, every inbound link you get is a vote in your favor. Now when you add an anchor text, it tells the search engine that not only am I voting for this website, I am voting for him for this particular keyword. Here’s an example of what I mean:

MetaSEO is a canadian search engine optimization company established in Montreal.

My anchor text above is “search engine optimization” which tells the search engine I am voting for this website in the keyword “search engine optimization”. It is very important that you optimize your anchor texts properly because they help a lot to increase your website’s rankings.

Creating a 404 Error Page

Creating a 404 error page will make sure to redirect any visitor that falls on a non-existing page on your website to a default page which will give the visitor choices of sections on your website.This happens sometimes when you click on broken links, or mistyped the URL. A page will appear saying “404 error, This Page Does Not Exist”. By customizing your 404 error page, you can be sure that any visitor that falls on a non-existing page of your website, will be redirected properly to what he was looking for.