Drupal SEO (2/3): Maximise results with on page / site formatting
SEO training is a vital part of our website design and development services. Without understanding these techniques and applying them, your hard work creating the content won't pay. It won't matter how good the Drupal web developer is, without great content it is just an empty shell.
This Drupal demo video discusses the different formatting options that we have available for text and images, that can help your websites performance in Google.
Headings
The use of headings helps to break a page up for the reader. It can help them understand the topic of the following paragraph without fully reading it. It works the same way for Google, it helps them better understand the page as well. It is therefore important to get your keywords into them.
The word "Headings" proceeding this in big bold letters is of course a heading.
Bold Text to emphasise keywords
The use of bold text can be used to highlight keywords and phrases to the reader and it kind of works the same way with search engines. It's not going to change everything but every little helps. This shouldn't be overused because it will loose its positive effect.
Deep linking keywords to your other content
When we link to pages from within our main content, we call it "deep linking". Sometimes we make a image into a link and other times it is text itself. In either case it is a good opportunity to link your keywords to the page.
For example, you create "Service A". When you create "Service B" you may have the opportunity to work a link to "Service A" into the page. Remember of course that the text for the link doesn't have to be the same as the pages title. It could be other keywords that also represent the page effectively. You could of course use an image to link over to "Service A".
For example remember to watch the video about researching keywords for SEO.
This can lead to a richer user experience in terms of site navigation and means you can keep the main menu simple, whilst placing links to the right content in the right places. It also means that you can create pages for industry specific terms for example. You could have a main page that mention the phrase. Then link that phrase to a page about it to build up the main pages relevancy.
Image alt and title attributes
We need to be clear on something, Google bots can't look at images. So how do they know what the image is of? It is through the text descriptions that people add to their images through the use of the Alt and Title image attributes.
The Alt (Alternative text) attribute gets displayed in place of your image if it can't load. The Title attribute gets displayed when you mouse over a image.
The video demonstrates how to add these attributes to your images.
Meta tags
There are two main tags to concern ourselves with and that is the title and description tags. Both of these are used to represent your website in Google. The title is used to create the big blue link to your website. The description tag is the brief text that is shown on Google under the big blue link.
Not only do these tags need to hit on your keywords, they have to grab the readers attention enough to get them to click. They also have to accurately describe your page, otherwise people will bounce back out and that is bad.
Keyword stuffing / spam
This is seriously bad and will bury you deep deep down in Google. If you just create poor quality content from a human perspective, Google will know it is poor quality content. How? because of your bounce rate.
What is a bounce rate? If 10 people come to your site and 9 people go straight back to Google, you would have a 90% bounce rate. Google's mission is to return the best and most accurate results. If everybody clicks the back button on one of their results, it is pretty obvious which way that result is going to go.
The search results is a bit like a music chart show in that respects. It is always on the move!
Drupal videos in this series:
Drupal SEO (1/3): How to do Keyword Research
Drupal SEO (2/3): Maximise results with on page / site formatting
