H1 Tag

Title /heading of the page should be mentioned in H1 tag, the length of title should be limited to 60-80 characters. The standard usage of H1 tag is 3 times for the home page and once in the inner pages

Internal Links And Sitemap page Optimization

• Creating Sitemap Page:

A sitemap is a web page that lists all the web pages on a website, typically organized in hierarchical way. Sitemap helps visitors and search engine bots to find pages on the site. It provides quick finding for search engine robot. Depending on the size of your website, it may actually link to all of your pages.
A truncated example version (For EDFED) would sit in the top left corner of his home page – and look like this.

• Creating navigation structure

Creating navigation structure, that search engine can read:

Your navigation structure needs to be visible to the search engines. A navigation structure created with JavaScript will not work for the search engines.

1. Add a site map page and link to it from your main navigation. It provides another way for search engines to find out all pages.
2. Whenever possible, provide keywords in text links as part of the navigation structure.
3. Even if your navigation structure is visible to search engines, you may want to have these bottom-of-page links as well. They are convenient for site visitors and provide another chance for the search engines to find your other pages. Another reason of that is basic text navigation.

Creating a good and proper directory structure is also very important. Keep your pages as close to the root domain as possible, rather than have a complicated multilevel directory structure. Create a directory for each navigation tab and keep all the files in that directory.
e.g. http://www.edfed.com/student-loan-consolidation/student-loan-consolidation.php

• Naming Files

Giving the proper keyword or product related names to all the images, pages etc… and the page names should be in lowercase.
e.g.
http://www.edfed.com/student-loan-consolidation.php .

• Avoiding Flash Animation

You should avoid using Flash Animations in the site because search engines cannot read the Flash Animations. However, if it is necessary to use Flash Animations in the site then there are a few things you can do to help with indexing:

1. Make sure you use your TITLE tags and DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDS Meta tag.
2. Put text between tags. You could use text; you can separate each keyword with comma and a space. Do not use both but use both a comma and no space or use a space and no comma.
3. Make sure that most of the keywords in the tag are also in the body text.
4. Don’t use a lot of repetition.
5. Don’t use the same KEYWORD tag in all your pages.

• Avoiding embedded text in images

You should avoid using the embedded text in images means you should use text base information in place of images which displays the information of content in it. And also use of large images should be avoided in the home page.

• Adding body text

You need text in the page but it should not be more than 100 to 250 words. If you are putting article in the page and the article is of 1000 words, then it is ok. However, the 100-250 word range is good. That amount of content allows you to really define, what the page is about and will help the search engine understand what the page is about.

1. Home page must contain the short information about all the facilities and products.
2. Other pages should contain the information regarding that page with the important keywords related to that page.
3. Keywords should used and repeated in content of all pages.

• Creating Headers

HTML has several tags that define headers: H1, H2, H3 and so on. These headers are useful in search engine optimization, because when you put keywords into a heading, you are saying to search engine, “These keywords are so important that they appear in heading text” and search engine pays more attention to them. Weighing them more heavily than keywords in body text.

• Formatting text

You can also tell the search engines that a particular word might be significant several other ways. If the text is displayed in some different way in the page means the search engine may assume that it is been set off for some reason. Following are few things you can set your keywords apart from the other words on the page:

1. Make the text bold.
2. Make the text italic.
3. Uppercase the first letter in Each Word, and lowercase the other letters in the word.

• Creating links

Links in your pages serve several purposes:

1. They help searchbots find other pages in your site.
2. Keywords in links tell search engines about the pages that the links are pointing at.
3. Keywords in links also tell the search engines about the page containing the links.
4. All the links must be text based hyperlinks.

• URL Rewriting

URL rewriting takes the variables out of a dynamic site URL and remaps them into a shorter version. For example:

1. OldURL: - http://www.example.com/index.php?this=1234&that=5678
2. Shorter, rewritten URL : http://www.example.com/1234/5678

When a user request a URL such as http://www.example.com/1234/5678, that URL is rewritten by the server behind the scenes so that the cript receives the variables this =1234 and that =5678. The scripts that drive the site must be written so that they create the shorter URL for links. The server translates the requested URLs internally without showing the translated version to the visitors.