(Direct Newsline) A number of marketers presented their sites for criticism before an audience at AdTech on Tuesday, hoping for tips on how to better optimize them.
Heymann Management (www.heymann-mgt.com), which does conference and event planning, was lacking a well-designed site map, said Ed Shull, CEO of online marketing company Click Squad, who presented the on-the-spot reviews. This behind-the-scenes site map, linking to every page on a site, helps search engines find each page.
“On your site map, link to each page with a keyword you want people to use, like ‘conference sites,'” Shull said.
A site that sells cheap international calling cards was in danger of putting off the spiders because it uses Javascript. “If you use Script or Javascript, put it in a separate file away from your text file,” Shull said.
Keywords are important to sprinkle throughout the text on a Web page, he said. But some sites use keyword stuffing — sandwiching the keyword into every line of text possible. “Don’t use keyword stuffing,” because the search engines don’t like it, Shull said. Instead, place those words in a way that they make sense.
The site www.cancercenter.com does everything right. The header, “cancer treatment hospitals,” works because it tells the search engine right up top what the site does. That is more important than the name of the site. “If your name is in your header title, you may get some exposure, but if you move the name to the back of the title, that’s better,” he said. If, however, you are a trusted brand, such as Forbes.com, then the name can be at the front of the header.
The number of links that connect to your site is important, too. Cancercenter has 125. “More than 100 is good,” Shull said. But the quality of the links is more important, he added.
“You would think that the more links you link to the better, but it’s how powerful the links are,” he said. “If you link to Forbes, it is ranked in the Yahoo search bar [a tool that can refer to your site] as No. 8, so then your site will be ranked as No. 7,” Shull said.
Cancercenter also features a picture of a tree as its logo. Engines can’t pick up pictures, but the site sidesteps that problem by including a slogan next to it: “Cancer treatment centers of America.” Since engines can spider the text slogan, they are not stopped by the image.