The tech-how of optimizing your website for the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The science of making your website visible to the major search engines consists of some technicalities which are sure indeed for better visibility, hence better business opportunities.
So, when your website is fully ready for launch, you need to think about search visibility to the users because the visitors won’t come all by themselves. And it might happen they won’t be able to find your website when they search with a keyword on Google or any other search engine. So how your ready-to-launch website is going to find its way to the top of search engine?
Sitecore CMS actually has some useful functionality that will help your site towards the top of the search engines results lists. Following are the tactics that can help your site editors to improve visibility of your website.
SEO and Sitecore
1. Content & Consistency: Content is the key and it should be relevant yet precisely specific. It should be most relevant to your users and it should contain most significant keywords. One most important thing is that search engines look for consistency between content and titles, therefore content editors should mix the relevant keywords in the browser title, menu title, page headings, and the first paragraph of your copy. Your content should accept the title heading tags h1, h2 etc. and keywords.
2. Meta Tags: Be specific and accurate when using meta tags and meta descriptions, using relevant keywords in the meta tag and meta description will help Search Engines pinpoint your content using a few keywords. Using appropriate keywords in setting your meta tags for particular page will help in crawling and indexing fast by the major Search Engines. The meta descriptions are used in the search engines results listings or Search Engine Results Listings (SERPs).
3. URL’s: Let your URL’s take purpose as it is the complete address to the page you are referring to. In Sitecore the URL is based on the names you choose for the object.
4. Structure: Structure first, content always- boost the interest with internal and external links. Keep the structure as flat as possible. If there are more levels in the content hierarchy then it will become difficult for the Search Engines to find and show out the relevant content easily.
5. Internal & External Links: The search engine robots give weightage to the number of links pointing to the site toward the high ranking in search results. It is beneficial to attach your business partner’s link to the site. This is for the externals links attached to the site, same goes to the internal links. It is recommended to create internal links between different pages or sections of your website.
6. Tag Cloud: To make it easy for navigation it is advised to put a tag cloud box on your website, typically it will consists your keywords. Once you will click on the keyword, all the related post will be shown to you with related tags.
7. XML Sitemap: This help search engines crawl and find the content with the help of your XML sitemap. With Sitecore you have an advantage as it automatically generate an updated sitemap that enables the search engine robots to crawl your website and helps to find the newest content.
8. Images: Pictures or images can also be read. The search engines make use of the descriptive titles and description to identify a particular image and thus indexed in the same style, especially when they function as links. Therefore, it is suggested to name pictures or images with relevant titles and alternative text titles (alt txt).
9. 301 Redirects: It helps you change the structure as well as the names in your website without any loss to the search ranking for those pages which are being already indexed by the search engine. Hold on to your ranking even when you make changes to your website.
10. Robots: Robots enables Search Engines to find your website when some search queries are performed. If you want search engines to find and index your web pages and follow the links, choose INDEX and FOLLOW. And in case, you don’t want them to follow the links then you should choose NOFOLLOW.
These are the top 10 tips and tactics that will help your site to indexed fast by major search engines and come up on prior places when get searched by users on the Internet. Help your website to come up on the top and get indexed for longer.
