Digital Marketing - Tips, Strategies & Guidelines

Written By Unknown on Wednesday 5 December 2012 | 09:21


Title Tag:

This tag should be as per Google’s set length, and shouldn't contain "Home" or other non-descriptive text. Use only one or two keyword targets for the page.

Effects on traffic: The title tag is an element that the search engines use to help determine what the webpage is all about. Since it shows up as the first line of your listing in search results, it can make or break your clicks if it does not sound appealing to people. A concise and appropriate title tag projects an image of professionalism as well as encourages users to bookmark your page, knowing they won't have to edit text to remember what they bookmarked.

Header tags:

There should always be some of the header tags. Recommended is H1, and headers varies from H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 to H6.

Effects on traffic: The header tags generally contain the theme of the page and are used by the search engines as one of the signals to tell them what the page is about.

Clean URL:

We should always have or try to keep clean URLs of our Webpages  Clean URL’s are the one’s which contain page related keywords in them and are free from any dynamically generated ID’s or any special characters in them.

Effects on traffic: Use clean URLs and add targeted keywords where you can to enhance the SEO friendliness of your site. You will notice search engines will highlight those pages in the results, so having pages that are descriptive is better than random characters and number sequences, which is almost always the case. But be careful about pages that have affiliate codes or ID's in them. If they are duplicate copies of existing pages on the site, you want to be sure the search engine is not seeing these affiliate pages as duplicate content. You can "NOINDEX" them if necessary.

Flash:

I would say minimal flash files, or No Flash files (.swf) on your website to keep your source code load time quick. More the flash files more will be the load time of the website.

Effects on traffic: Some websites we find use Flash in a way that hinders the search engines, which can make them difficult to rank. Make sure you use alternate HTML content, and avoid full Flash intros, as we've seen those lead to high bounce rates on your traffic.

Robots.txt:

A robots.txt file should always be found in the root (www.site.com/robots.txt) and recommended is to have fewer than 20 lines of code.

Effects on traffic: Your robots.txt file, located in your root folder, is a way for webmasters to indicate which pages/folders/directories should not be accessed by crawlers or search engines. A good example is any pages behind a login. However, there are some serious misuses of the robots file that we come across sometimes, and we want to try and alert you to those. Overusing or blocking too many sections of your site could cause harm to your inbound link effectiveness.

404 Not Found Errors:

When you submit www.site.com/dfhdihsdfs (or any other junk) and the header returns back "404". Custom 404 pages are acceptable and recommended is that you should create custom 404 page for such kind of junk or non-existent URL’s.

Effects on traffic: Handling 404 errors improperly can actually lead to a lot of duplicate content. If we find that you're sending us a 200 OK server response code on a page that does not exist, you also allow the search engine to index that page too. Not what you want happening.

Blocking Search Engines:

It’s really awesome if you're not inadvertently blocking the search engines from crawling and indexing your website.

Effects on traffic: Blocking the search engines in your robots.txt file, or by other means, is surely going to affect your traffic. You can also accidentally block link juice using your robots.txt too extensively.

Malware Check:

There should not be any Malware present on your website or you should not be on any malware lists, or engaged in any other malware attacks or spread activity.

Effects on traffic: If you end up on this list, it is HIGHLY likely that Google has removed you from the listings completely, and your traffic has likely dropped significantly. You'll need to address this immediately.

Google Analytics or other’s to track visitors:

Recommended is that you should always have at-least one Analytics scripts in header or footer section of the page and if it’s Google then it’s Awesome!! Well there are many other tools available in market to track your visitors and are of same features as if Google Analytics like Site Catalyst, Web Trendz, SEO Moz, Web CEO, IBP and others.

Effects on traffic: While this won't affect your traffic, it is what you need to measure YOUR traffic.

Duplicate Content (www redirect):

It looks PERFECT if you are properly redirecting the non-www version of your website to the www version, or vice versa. This avoids a type of duplicate content that could affect your rankings, which is usually called Canonical Issue on website.

Effects on traffic: Smaller fractions of duplicate content, like the www redirect (the one we're looking for here) can have a moderate impact on traffic. You may see after doing the proper 301 redirect from www to non-www (or vice versa) will result in moderately better rankings. Actual duplicate content, where you post the exact content on two different websites for instance, have a much higher impact. It is highly likely only one of those sites will rank with the content and a small chance that both will not rank at all. Recommended is Avoid duplicate content!!!

Best of luck for all your Digital Marketing Efforts :)

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