Do you want to get your site from page five to page one in Google? Here are a few tips to boost you on your way.
1. Clean up your HTML.
Keep a beady eye on Dreamweaver, and avoid CMS software.
What, Dreamweaver, beloved program of pro webmasters everywhere?
Yes!
Dreamweaver adds lots of extra blank space to HTML code, and breaks lines. This is especially irritating in meta tags. Use EditPad’s ‘Find and Replace’ function to get rid of newlines and double blank spaces in your pages.
Content Management Systems are a great time saver. An amateur can set up a professional-looking site in a few hours. The problem is they contain lots of code that’s irrelevant to search engines. The top of a CMS page may contain only a few words relevant to its subject matter.
Then there’s the duplicate content problem.
– Blogs have duplicate copies of their own content; sometimes exact, sometimes excerpts.
– Thousands of people are using the same CMS as you.
– A search engine spider sees the same header, sidebar and footer content in every page in your site.
Result? Your page is...