Anyone who has a vested interest in getting more Internet traffic has probably already heard about google places optimization, or Google Local Optimization. This is a wide assortment of techniques that can make your site show up higher on search engine results pages, increasing its exposure and bringing in more visitors. While there are many angles to approach the Google Local Optimization game from, this article will let you know about a few of the “under the hood” tweaks you can give your site for better search engine performance.
Google Local Optimization Tips To Improve Your Performance
You always need to keep in mind that the indexing process the search engines use to rank your site is highly automated. Your rank is assigned by automatic programs and algorithms, not individuals. In order to stay friendly to the software that will be judging your site, keeping things simple is a great idea. Make sure your HTML code is straightforward and error-free. Don’t use JavaScript or Flash except where absolutely necessary; ranking algorithms have a hard time dealing with them. If there are sections of your site that you know won’t play well with the search engines, keep in mind that you can cordon them off using a “robots.txt” file. Any directories or files you list there will be excluded by indexing programs.
While the importance of placing keywords throughout your site’s code has been overstated in the past, it’s not an idea to abandon entirely. Don’t expect your sites rank to jump up by pages just because you’ve got keywords in your URLs. Yet making sure that you’re consistent in your keyword use is a good thing. A page that’s focused on one Google Local Optimization keyword should feature that keyword throughout, from its title tags to its URL. If the software tools you use to maintain your site give you dynamic page names, look into using static URLs with keywords instead. Not only are dynamic URLs keyword-free, they’re also temporary. They can’t build up long-term Google Local Optimization performance the way a traditional page can.
Adding Internal Links
Every website changes over time. The way you handle revisions to your site can make a big difference in terms of optimization. Broken internal links are a very bad thing, both for visitors and search engines. You need to check frequently to make sure all your links work. When you discover a link that’s pointing to a page that isn’t there anymore, though, don’t just delete it. Remember that there may be off-site links pointing to the missing page, too. Replace the missing page with a redirect that points to your homepage before you get rid of your outdated internal links. This makes your site easier to navigate and also makes it easier for the search engines to index.
If you get really serious about optimizing your site for search engine ranking, you’ll no doubt uncover a lot of advice about how to pick keywords and tweak your content. Those kinds of changes are definitely worth making, but you mustn’t neglect the kind of “behind the scenes” Google Local Optimization techniques you’ve read about here. If you work with both your content and your code, you’ll be well on your way to mastering the Google Local Optimization game and pushing your site up to the top of the results page.