Marc Schillaci - Oxatis Founder and CEO

Optimizing Natural SEO #2: Advice from the Oxatis Team

As promised, part 2 of this post dedicated to natural search engine optimization:
Like last time, it's a compilation of the most important SEO strategies recommended by our technical support team and Emmanuelle, the Direct Marketing Manager at Oxatis.

- How to optimize a page title?
 The title is one of the most important factors for optimizing your web pages. This title is also the one that search engines generally use as the title of your page in their list of search results.
 
The title should be between 50 and 80 characters long to satisfy the criteria of most search engines.

•  Include one or two of your most important keywords in the title. However, don't just list your keywords. Formulate an intelligible sentence.

• Choose an attractive title that will inspire Internet users to click on your link.

• Put the keywords at the beginning of your title so that they won't be cut off by search engine space limitations.

- How to optimize the content?

The content of your home page is just as important as the title, the description and the keywords if you want to be placed higher up in the lists of search engine search results. The content is the text that will be read by someone who visits your site.

Search engine crawlers read this content as any other visitor would and look for keyword expressions.

To get the best results, the page should include at least 200 words. The text should not only include your keywords, but should also be coherent and intelligible. It is imperative that you use the words and expressions that you used in the title, description and keyword fields.

Another very important point is keyword repetition (but careful, not too much!). Keyword density is a ratio, expressed in percentage, between the number of times a keyword appears and the total number of words in the page. In general, this ratio shouldn't exceed 10 % and should be applied to all of the important places in your site: page name, title, h1, h2, h3, meta... However, don't overdo it because Google will blacklist you if they think you are "spamdexing".

- URL Rewriting
URL Rewriting is a technique that consists in redefining page addresses (often called URLs) to make them more understandable and more meaningful for search engines.

Often, in dynamic sites (using dynamic pages), the pages are often characterized by complex URLs that generally include a question mark, possibly the "&" character, as well as the variable names and the value names.

For example: http://www.MyDomain.com/Catalog.asp?ViewID=2&ProductID=7429&CatID=47
When reading this address, it's difficult to get a clear-cut idea about the content of the displayed page. You may suspect that a product from the catalog is going to be displayed, but it's impossible to determine what type of product that may be.

Furthermore, certain search engines (increasingly rare) don't necessarily like these parameters and only index the first two or three to limit the combinations. Therefore, it is recommended that you rewrite these URLs following the example of the following format: http://MyDomain.com/MyProduct.Color.htm for better search engine optimization.
(And, of course, you can rewrite URLs on the Oxatis platform :)

Marc.

Optimizing Natural SEO #1: Advice from the Oxatis Team

 
Search engine optimization is one of the favorite topics of both novice and experienced e-merchants.

I've put together the most important SEO strategies recommended by our technical support team and Emmanuelle, the Direct Marketing Manager at Oxatis.

These are the questions our customers ask most often to our technical support:


 When will my site be on Google?

- URL registration in a search engine database is generally recognized immediately. However, indexing its content will take about 1-2 weeks for paid submissions and 2-6 months for free submissions.

- Web indexing crawlers behave exactly like Internet users. They scan the pages, taking note of all of the words therein. They identify all of the hyperlinks in the page and visit each URL in turn. By doing so, crawlers are able to scan several million documents hyperlinked to a starting base of only several hundred pages.

- If a site is momentarily unavailable when the crawlers pass by (under construction, closed to the public, network failure or problem), its indexing is simply postponed. Remember: Don't open a site that's under construction ;)

- When crawlers index a site, they first use the META tags to build the summary that will appear when the site is searched for.

- Indexing is carried out for the integrality of the text, which means that crawlers take all of the words in a Web page into account. In other words, when a keyword is entered in a search, crawlers respond according to the weight they give to each word in the site. This weight takes META tags into account, as well as the location of the words in the page, their frequency, and their formatting.

In other words, it pointless to enter keywords that don't correspond to your site's content, and in particular your home page.

 How to achieve the best possible ranking?

- The best way to obtain a good ranking is to have keyword-rich content that corresponds to what your prospects will be searching for.

- Identify and focus your efforts on several keywords or expressions - those that Internet users will enter to access your pages. Build the titles of your pages, menus, home page, etc. around these words. They need to show up more often than the others.

- An introduction paragraph with a descriptive text containing your most important keywords will help the search engine to create a better summary of your site.

How do I get my site on the first page of Google?

- This is THE question most commonly asked to technical support, at trade shows, and elsewhere...
At the risk of disappointing you...you have to know that there's no miracle solution for getting your site to show up first.

- Having little or no competition is an enormous advantage. A lot of Oxatis customers choose to sell in a strategic niche market, which helps them rapidly appear at the top of the list.

- Google results are classified according to the content of your pages. Calculating the scores is complex. The number, quality and reputation of other sites with a backlink to your site (reciprocal links) are all taken into account by search engines, who generally classify sites without any sort of manual intervention.
- The same rules apply as in real life: To be at the top, you have to be the best, most well-rounded, worst noteworthy site!

How to optimize keywords?

Keyword choice is a critical step in SEO. It doesn't do any good to choose keywords that no one is going to run a query on in a search engine because it won't generate any traffic! If you already have a site, you can use Google Analytics to see the keywords your visitors entered to find your site.

- Otherwise, you can use a keyword generator to help you make your choice. The Google Adwords generator can be very useful tool.
 
- Use specific expressions describing the type of products or services that you offer because the competition for certain general terms is so tight that it will be very difficult to be ranked among them. You will attract more-focused, high quality visitors if they come from a web search query containing specific terms.

- To know if a good ranking is possible, go to Google. If you're interested in a specific expression, perform a query on the expression. Then look at the number of results provided by Google. A good ranking is possible if there are less than 20,000 results. However, once you reach more than 200,000 results, getting a good ranking becomes more complicated because there are too many results...but it's not impossible!

- Check out what the competition is doing. Perform a query on the keywords you're thinking about using, and when you've found a website that interests you with a good rating, display its source code (Menu: View/Page Source) and take note of the keywords that are being used for the site in the META tags (look for the [ meta name="keywords" ] tag).

- Establish a list of keyword expressions. A good method is to use an Excel table with the keywords you have chosen in the first column, and then use a column for each competitor. Determine which keywords are the most used and the most pertinent, as well as those that will differentiate you for the others.

A big thanks to the Oxatis team for taking the time to pool their wisdom and experience! This isn't the last you'll hear about SEO. Next week I'll post optimization techniques for the title, content and URL rewriting.

Till next time,

Marc