nzherald.co.nz

The title will be displayed in search engine results in the form of a direct link to the site.

Tips:
1. ideally, the title should contain 10 to 70 characters, including spaces. (Google displays up to 70 characters in the title, and takes into account only the first 12 words.)
2. put the most important and relevant keywords in the title, try not to repeat any word.
3. each individual page should have a unique title.

Meta Descriptions provide concise explanations of the contents of web pages, that are commonly used by search engines on search result pages to display preview snippets for a given page.

Tips:
1. it is best to keep meta descriptions between 70-160 characters.
2. a readable, compelling description using important keywords can draw a much higher click-through rate of searchers to the given web page.
3. avoid keyword stuffing, ensure each page has its own unique description.

an optimized SERP snippet will have a higher click through rate.

Tips:
1. make sure the title is clear, simple, straight to the point.
2. make sure the description is relevant and properly summarized the page content.

Meta keywords should not be ignored, though they are not a major ranking factor for most of search engines nowadays. A Meta keywords tag is supposed to be a brief and concise list of the most important themes of your page

Tips:
1. keep your list of keywords or keyword phrases down to 10 - 20 unique words or phrases.
2. separate the words or phrases using a comma (you do not need to leave a space between words separated by commas).
3. do not repeat words or phrases.
4. put your most important word or phrases at the beginning of your list.

Declare the language in use can help search engine to better understand and rendering your page, especially when special characters are encountered.

Declare the character encoding can help search engine to better rendering your page, especially when it comes to
non-asii characters.

Site speed is becoming an crucial ranking factor. Slow page loading is one of the biggest complains of web users. If the loading time is too long, you may need to check your server, network, or system codes and structure.

Tips:
1. ideal loading time is less than 1 seconds, if it take more than 5 seconds to load your site, likely users will run out of patience, so do search engines.
2. improve your SEO by optimizing your website to have a small size and faster responding server.

Flash content can not be properly indexed by search engines, and normally flash file is large in size, which slow down the loading of your page.

Tips:
1. avoid flash content whenever possible if you wish to have a fast and SEO friendly website.

Framesets and individual frames could cause problem for search engine to crawl your pages

Tips:
1. avoid frames whenever possible.
2. search engines do not like frames.
3. use iframe instead if you really have no choice.

nested tables could slow down page rendering and lead to bad user experience.

Tips:
1. avoiding <table> for your page layout.
2. using <div> instead of <table>.

Search Engines treat URLs with or without "www" as two different records.

Tips:
1. edit your .htaccess file and permanently redirect one to the other (eg redirect www.mysite.com to mysite.com).

search engines cannot `see` images, proper Alt content will help them to better understand and index images.

Tips:
1. always add alt attributes to images. Alt is mandatory for accessibility and for valid XHTML.
2. words used within an image`s Alt attribute should be its text equivalent and convey the same information.
3. use a human-readable caption and descriptive text around the image.

Having a blog is a great way to provide fresh content and retain users, search engines favour it too.


Tips:
1. regularly update your blog and provide fresh and quality content.
2. relevant blogs of your website topics, generate more credits in the eyes of your visitors, as well as search engines.

Number of backlinks from some other root domains is an indicator of domain authority, the more backlinks your site has, the higher its domain authority, which leads to a higher chance of better ranking.

Tips:
1. make it easy for others to link to your site, provide the code if possible.
2. links from older domains are more powerful than links from new domains.
3. links from .edu and .gov generally have a higher value.

Users are concerned about the safety of their online transactions. Trustworthiness rating is based on real user ratings and that tells you how much other users trust this site, so do the serch engines. note: this trustworthiness score is provided by WOT (Web of Trust).

Tips:
1. pay attention to the look and design of your site, many people look for visual cues when assessing a site`s credibility
2. make your site easy to use, sites that are easy to navigate are perceived as being more trustworthy.
3. make it easy for user to contact you, users will be more comfortable and feel more secured shall they need to get in touch with you.

Ensure that your site is malware free and does not cause harm to users` computers.

Tips:
1. do not put virus, malicious worms, adwares, trojans, spywares and suspicious phishing code in your server.
2. take suspicious behaviours seriously, have a regular check-up and monitor closely of your server`s log files.
3. if your site is black-listed by Google as suspicious, clean it up before requesting for a review.

A secure and safe server is not only good for your site visitors but also good for search engines.

Tips:
1. server software version information can be utilized by malicious visitors to attack your server.
2. by turning off the server signature, you actually have made your server a little bit more secure.
3. for Apache server - edit the apache2.conf or the .htaccess file to turn server signature off.