Coding Your Way to SEO Success

Search engine optimization (SEO) has come a long way since the early days of the internet, becoming more of an art than a science, and requiring constant vigilance. The good news is that search engines have just as much of an interest as you do in ensuring that the results returned for a query are relevant and useful. To this end, search engines look for ways to identify high-quality sites to place at the top of their results page, and have begun to share those techniques – which involve working with the source code on web pages – with webmasters for mutual benefit. So, as a designer or website builder, what are some ways that you can benefit from these SEO factors that search engines like Google and Bing have implemented? Let’s look at five options that you can integrate into your SEO strategies that will help you in your quest for SERP rank.

Rich Snippets

Google introduced rich snippets back in 2009 as a way to include more information about a web page’s content on the search engine results page (SERP). If qualifying types of content are tagged with the appropriate HTML tags, Google may show that information in a website’s entry on the SERP. Beyond the initial setup of the snippets, no extra effort is required of the SEO team, making them an incredibly powerful tool for relatively little effort. The types of information currently supported by rich snippets are reviews, people, products, business listings, recipes, music, events and video content. Given this, it’s obvious that some types of businesses will benefit more from implementation of rich snippets than others. If you do fit one of these categories, taking the time to add the necessary code will almost certainly pay off in more traffic and clickthroughs. Google is not the only search engine recognizing snippets – all of the major search engines are collaborating on standardizing the markup for rich snippets – see http://schema.org for more information on this. No need to learn a new language, as snippets use tags similar to the familiar HTML you are used to. The process for integrating rich snippets consists of three basic steps. First, decide which markup format you will use (Microdata, Microformats, or RDFa); second, mark up the content; and third, test the markup to ensure the coding is correct. Google has a tool for testing markup where all you need do is enter the URL (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets). Here’s a screenshot of a successful test for a snippet identifying the author of a piece of content, which includes the thumbnail photo of the author and links to more articles.

more on Written by Ahmad Permessur Hotscripts.com