5 Simple Steps That Help Your Website Ranks Better in Malaysia
On-page optimization is becoming more and more important nowadays. It set as fundamental to rank high. Based on my observation, the majority of the websites in Malaysia are not optimized yet.
You still can see plenty of website with their company name as their title or even just “Home” as the page title. Visually it looks perfect, but it is poorly designed in SEO point of views.
You may spend 5 or 10-minute works to make the changes but may potentially help your website rank high if you are in a low competition niche industry.
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Here is the basic but essential on-page optimization you should check.
#1 – Site Meta Tag – Title and description
The first rule that must be followed in on-page optimization is to put a valid title and description tag.
There are many Malaysian companies make the biggest mistake to put in their company name as the title tag. E.g. “Welcome to Larry Trading Pte Ltd” or “Welcome to LarryTrading.com”.
Then, never put the description tag on their web page. Search engine weights heavily on the title and heading, content to find a relevant website based on user input. If you never use any related keywords, the search engine will never be able to find your website.
Important tips for Meta Title:
- Always include your target keywords.
- Add some numbers. It can be a date or X things to…
- Add some emotional or power words
Google mentioned that the content in the description tag is not part of the ranking factor. However, it is still important and will impact the ranking indirectly. We should optimize the description to be catchy, trigger the curiosity and encourage searchers to click on your website to find out more.
Take a look at the example below. Which result will get the most clicks?
Obviously, the second result pops up and will trigger more clicks compared to others even though it is not in #1.
- The title consists of a catchy title with power words, numbers and main keywords.
- The description will trigger searchers to find click in and find out more the best offers.
Find out more on how to use meta tag here: https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2012/05/01/how-to-use-html-meta-tags/
The navigation of a website is important in helping visitors find the content they want as soon as possible. Avoid putting all pages in one root directory. I highly recommend having at least 2 or max 4 levels. It depends on your content and number of pages.
You should try to put your target keywords as part of your URL. Keyword within a URL or domain name sends a strong relevancy signal to Google about the topic of the content.
Navigation menu also plays a vital role to make sure the search engine can crawl all your pages. Always go for text link or CSS menu link instead of Flash menu, Silverlight menu or java applet. This is because the search engine does not understand them. The other important factor is never used frame or iframe in your page.
#3 – Optimize Your Heading
Heading in the website is just like Heading style setting in a word document. It is used to structure your document into the main topic, sub-topic, etc.
Heading tag in HTML are refer to special code, <h1>, <h2> to <h6> tags are designed to define headings. <h1> defines the biggest heading text and <h6> refers to the smallest heading text. You can find out more about heading text at https://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/tag_hn.asp
Why are heading tags important for Search Engine?
Heading tags are used by search engines to identify words which are more important than the rest of the page text. The theory is that headings will sum up the topic of the page, so they are counted as important keywords.
Multiple heading sizes used to create a hierarchical structure for your content, making it easier for users to navigate through your document too.
When you come to optimize the content of your page, you will need to use heading to define your content title and subtitle. I recommended using heading from H1-H4. Here is an example of how to layout your heading tag:
Malaysia online boutique – LarryFashion (H1)
Offer cheap online shopping on clothes and fashion product in Malaysia (H2)
Body content goes here…Shop online and get free delivery (H3)
subtitle content goes here…October Promotions (H3)
subtitle content goes here…
Important Tips for heading:
- Always include your target keywords in your heading H1.
- Try to include the partial keywords and secondary keywords in other heading tags.
However, the heading tag needs to be used wisely. There are things you should not do:
- Placing text in heading tags that wouldn’t help define the structure of the page
- Using heading tags where other tags like <em> and <strong> may be more appropriate
- Erratically moving from one heading tag size to another
- Overuse of heading tags throughout the entire page
- Putting most of the page’s text into a heading tag
Note: You may find that the default styles aren’t exactly what you need. In particular, the default sizes can be quite large. You might like to define your heading styles using CSS.
#4 – Optimizing web page content for user and search engine
Since Google implement Google Panda and Penguin in its search algorithm, content is becoming a more and more important factor to rank high.
Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here. Users know good content when they see it and will probably want to direct other users to it.
This could be through blog posts, social media services, email, forums, or other means. Organic or word-of-mouth buzz is what helps build your site’s reputation with both users and Google, and it rarely comes without quality content.
Nevertheless, it will be even better if quality content is optimized with keywords rich and search engine friendly.
The trick to optimizing your page content is using the most important keywords frequently and in the right places without compromising the readability of your content.
But do not over-optimized your content with all keywords. Google may penalize as keyword stuffing. Here are some few tips on how you can achieve the goal.
What is the word count should be?
- Check your what is the page length that ranking well in your competition? If the top 5 of the competitors are having 1200-1500 words, you should have similar words count.
- In general, articles with word count<500 is known as “thin” content (contact us page are excluded). Google may penalize your site if the percentage of thin content is high over your total articles. It won’t hurt if you only have a few of them.
- But there is an exception for a certain type of website. E.g. For an eCommerce website, it doesn’t make sense to have 2000 words to describe a fashion shirt. In this case, you may just need 200-300 words and more images to fit the requirement from Google.
- The trick is always to check who is ranking well. Then, reverse engineer what’s working.
How frequent my keyword should be?
- First, never fill up every keyword in a single page. This simply dilutes your site’s relevance and reduces readability. The search engine will see your site as spam, and visitor to your site will find it hard to read.
- A good guideline is tried to keep your site-wide average keyword density of around 2%. Density is a measure of frequency in relation to the total word count of the page. If your page has 500 words and your keyword phrase appear 10 times, its density is 2%.
- It is best to only target one main topic keyword per page. If you need to focus more than one topic keyword, simply create a page for each.
#5 – Layout position of the content
A good rule of thumb is always placing your important content with rich keywords on top-left position. This is because the search engine will assume the top content is the most important content.
In fact, visitors do always read from top to bottom. The newspaper always has the headline news on the top of it. So, make sure your important content always is at the top of each page.
The benefit of having good and fresh content
I help various types of websites to implement SEO campaign in the past. Similar works have been done to clients in the same niche industry but noticed that website with rich content and regularly update often able to rank higher and faster.
This is the proven facts and indeed matches Google’s intention to rank high on a web page with good content and regularly update (See more about Google freshness algorithm here). So, content is an important factor to rank high.
Conclusion
In short, all the guidelines above are simple and easy to do. It definitely can help your site rank better if you do it correctly. Now, go and start tweaking your website!
Note: I also have another article about image optimization.
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About the Author Adam
Adam is the founder of Adam SEO. He started his SEO journey in 2005 and officially ventured into offering an SEO consultancy service in 2011. He helped numerous companies in Malaysia and Singapore to get targeted traffic and increase their website visibility through SEO marketing.