Increasing Your SERP’s Part 2
In our first article for increasing your SERP’s we covered some basics to increase your SERP’s. Today we’re going to cover a few more factors that are more “Google” specific in increasing your SERP’s. This mainly covers internal and external links, and how well written your page is.
One of the factors Google uses is how popular a page is among the site itself. You’ll often see us linking to our other pages in our site and that’s a good practice to start doing, you’ll even see some examples on this page. Make sure you know how to properly link to your site and make sure the pages are relevant to each other. Keep your link structure solid or else your pages still won’t perform well.
The quality and relevance of external sites linking to your page. If you’ve got a site about hamburgers/food then naturally you’re hoping to get a lot of links from related site. You do not want to seek out a ton of links coming back from pages about poems. Having quality links back to your page will increase your SERP’s dramatically as Google gives them more authority.
How old the page is will influence your SERP’s. The older the page, the better as Google trusts the page, and therefore thinks its wonderful. As you can see when your site is first starting out your search engine traffic will be non-existent almost. But as time passes, you’re content stays the same then you’ll notice an increase in your SERP’s
Google loves content and this will reinforce the fact that content is king in the SEO world. If you’ve composed your page full of images, fancy flash moves, javascript and other content that makes people wonder if they are in HTML hell or not, you’ve not only failed as a designer, but also at optimizing your page to have any chance of increasing SERP’s. This also goes in the reverse as well, if you’ve filled your page full of spammy text/content you need to go back in, and fix it as it won’t increase your SERP’s at all!
The flow of the document structure or organization of how the page structured. You’ll often run across sites that are a complete and utter disaster with this, some of their content will be up top, then continue down low or off to the side. Not only is it difficult for the readers, but imagine the confusions amongst the spiders as well.
How close your document is to your web root will impact how how you rank in the SERP’s. Having a document anything past 7 folders deep is bad practice. You can count the number of folders it’s considered deep by counting the slashes after your domain (/) as you can see these pages are considered 1 level off the web root. Our SEO Talk forums are considered 1 level from the web root as well. Once you dig into the forums, you’ll start to notice more slashes, and this indicates that the content is getting deeper and deeper in the site. Therefore when you pick your sites friendly URL’s make sure to keep them as close to the top as you can!
Spelling errors and grammatical errors, should be non-existant. However if you’ve ever read one of our articles, I’m sure you can point a few out. Many CMSes come with built in spell checkers, and most browsers are starting to include them in their builds as aswell. Even if you have to take your page, copy and paste it to a word processor, fixing the mistakes are part of the little things that seperate you from number one and number 11.
HTML Validation of documents, may help increase your SERP’s though it certainly hasn’t been proven or even a offical statement from any search engines issued. Validation should be a low priority for SEO. The validation pages hold about as much weight as my grandma at a swinger convention. There is no way that validating your code will improve your SEO, as Adam Lasnik from Google mentioned that rewarding validation & accessibility of documents would be a ’slippery slope’.
These tips are aimed mainly at increasing your SERP is the most popular search engine today, Google. Attempt to implment these tips along with the tips that were found in our first part of increasing your SERP’s and let us know how it works
Nice article David, it would be nice if the first sentence talking about the first post, was linked too