On-Page SEO for Software Developers
Follow this easy-to-understand guide to improve the visibility of your website, increase distribution of your software and grow your user base.
Published 8/29/2011
On-Page SEO for Software Developers
About this series
This article is part of a series of articles about software marketing for developers. Follow this easy-to-understand guide to improve the visibility of your website, increase distribution of your software and grow your user base.
In this series:
Part 1 – Make your site convert
Part 2 – Distribute your download
Part 3 – On-page SEO for Software Developers (this page)
Introduction to SEO
Search engine results are clearly a key factor in driving software distribution. As most developers can attest, a huge percentage of website visits are driven directly from search results; which means if you want to improve distribution, you need to optimize your site for great search engine rankings.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your web site’s visibility in search engines so it shows up closer to the top of organic (non-paid/non-ad) search results when someone queries keywords related to your site or software. Search engines constantly test and tweak the “signals”, or the data they use to rank the relevancy of sites and pages, which is what makes SEO as much art as dynamic science.
The closer to the top of a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) your software shows up, the higher the chance of someone clicking through to your site. A recent study by Optify, conducted in December 2010 using data from organic keyword searches, found that on average the #1 search result receives 36.4% of clicks, followed by 12.5%, 9.5% and 7.9% for the second, third and forth positions.
Search results are determined by the relevancy of a web-page in relation to the search query and the “authority” the site or page has. Authority equals trust, and while little is known about how exactly search engines calculate authority — the number and quality (authoritativeness) of backlinks to your site is definitely a key factor.
SEO is a combination of “on-page” and “off-page” factors. In this guide we’re focusing on SEO techniques to employ on your site (i.e. on-page SEO). Effective on-page SEO will help you with your off-page SEO, which we’ll cover in another article about building links back to your site.
What follows is an overview of some of the best ways to maximize your site’s on-page SEO.
Keywords
Know your keywords. Google provides a great keyword tool to show how much traffic is generated by different keywords that relate to your software/site. Based on this information, you can determine the relative importance of various keywords related to your software. You can also use this information to structure your site and content (e.g. URLs, title tags, H1s, bolded text, etc) for better search engines rankings.
When starting a new site, it’s easier to rank higher by targeting keywords that are less competitive, i.e. keywords that aren’t in great demand by other sites. Perhaps more importantly, when choosing keywords think about the words that someone would use to search for a solution to the problem your software solves, instead of keywords that are all related to the features and functionality that your software has. If you want to get an idea of what keywords are driving the most traffic for your competitors check out Alexa.
Content
Your goal is to write easy to understand content that includes your target keywords. This isn’t about trying to stuff as many keywords you can on a page – it’s about writing copy that naturally includes your targeted keywords. A general rule of thumb is to use your targeted keywords 2-3 times for a short page and 5-7 times on a longer page. Check out this SEOMoz article about perfecting on-page keyword targeting.
Search engines and users love sites that deliver fresh content, so think about starting a blog to help bring in new and repeat visitors. Most importantly, never “lock” important content in file formats that search engines have trouble crawling (Flash, even AJAX can be a problem — Google offers guidance on ensuring AJAX is crawlable, etc).
Remember, content isn’t king; original, relevant, high-quality content is king.
Site architecture
Your site architecture determines how easy it is for search engines to crawl and users to find your content. The “flatter” the site architecture, the better. Meaning, the fewer levels it takes to get to content, the better off you’ll be. Your goal should be to make all of your content accessible within three clicks. Your most important content, including your software download, should be one click away. Check out this post which includes a video about site architecture.
Site speed
Although site speed is currently a very,very small factor in your site’s rankings, ensuring your site is as fast as possible creates a better user experience. It also speeds the time it takes for search engines to effectively crawl your site and for users to load pages. KISSMetrics published an infographic which illustrates how slow site speed increases the rate of users abandoning a site/page. They found that “40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load” and that “A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.”
A couple of ways to increase your site’s speed (and save on bandwidth) include: keeping image files as small as possible without losing quality, minimizing the number and size of Javascript libraries your site uses (Google offers hosted libraries you can use), tighter “or” cleaner HTML and CSS code (try a CSS minimizer), and using Gzip to compress pages (works on Linux and Windows web servers). Google has a page dedicated to tools and services designed to help make the web faster. Yahoo offers a great tool for measuring site speed called YSlow which works in Firefox, Chrome and Opera. It tests webpages and assigns grades (A-F) to different factors that influence speed so you can figure out what changes to make to increase performance.
Page title tag
The title tag tells search engines and site visitors what a page is about and is one of the most important factors for on-page SEO. Use your chosen keywords here, with the most important keywords as the first words of the page title. The page title is also what users see on a SERP, although most engines limit what they show to around 65 characters along with a short description of the page (see Meta Descriptions). While not absolutely necessary, you can include the name of your site or company in the page title; just make sure it’s appended to the END of the URL.
Example: You make a free application to help users backup their Windows system.
Note this is a highly competitive category of software with many established products.
Best:
Windows Backup Cloning Software Free | ABCSoftware
Good:
Windows Backup Software Free | ABCSoftware – Makers of Great Windows Software
Bad:
ABCSoftware – Makers of Great Windows Software – Free Windows Back Software
If you’re aiming to get people to download your Windows’ backup software, put the right keywords first!
Headline Tag (H1) and other header tags
The headline tag (H1) is used for the main headline of a page and usually matches the page’s title tag, but it doesn’t have to. The header tag doesn’t carry as much weight for rankings as previously thought, but it’s still important to use so people can easily see the main topic of the page. Make sure you only use one <H1> tag per page as Google has been known to penalize pages that use multiple h1s. Other header tags (H2, etc) help you semantically structure your content, but won’t do anything to increase rankings.
Example: You have a piece of software for downloading photos from Flickr.
You decide to target the keywords: “download photos” “flickr”.
Good:
<h1>Download Flickr Photos Quickly & Easily</h1>
Not-so-good:
<h1>Learn How You Can Quickly & Easily Download Photos from Flickr</h1>
URL structure
URLs are incredibly important in determining how a page ranks. Ideally, you should structure your URLs so that the most important keywords are at the beginning of the URL, and keep all URLs as short as possible. Shorter URLs are easy for people to understand at a glance, and make it much easier for them to share. Always use hyphens instead of underscores since hyphens are “guaranteed” to be treated as spaces (which are bad), whereas underscores are not. Never use spaces in URLs, they will be converted to % and having % in a URL isn’t very friendly. It’s also generally advisable to strip file extensions from the end of your URLs, but is not an SEO necessity.
Good SEO-friendly URL:
http://mysoftware.com/windows-disk-cloning-free-software
Not-so-good URLs for SEO:
http://mysoftware.com/viewpage.php?p=2526982
http://mysoftware.com/software/downloads/Mysoftware-Super-Disk-Cloner
http://mysoftware.com/software/downloads/mysoftware_super_disk_cloner.aspx
Images and alt text
Using appropriate file names and alt text for images is an often overlooked way to optimize your site and has the potential to drive more traffic from image-based searches. The key is to make sure the file names of your images and the alt text include your target keywords. The title tag (which is shown when hovering over an image) is another place to use your relevant, targeted keywords. SEOMoz recently published a great write-up on the importance of optimizing your images for SEO.
Good:
http://mysoftware.com/windows-disk-backup-cloning-free-software.jpg
Not-so good:
http://mysoftware.com/softwarelogo.jpg
Idea:
Release your images under a Creative Commons license. Say a software blogger is
searching for an image for a post about Windows backup software. By naming your
image with your targeted keywords, the blogger may discover your software and if
it’s good, he or she may include you in their article.
Meta descriptions
Meta descriptions don’t carry any weight as far as rankings go, but they serve an important function – they can help drive increased click-throughs to your site. On a SERP, you’re presented with a page title as well as a snippet of what the page is about – this is *usually* the meta description. A well-written, original and catchy meta description — no longer than 150-160 characters (the maximum length shown for a search result) — which contains your relevant and targeted keywords along with a strong call to action (see example below) can make the difference between someone clicking on your site or someone else’s – as long as the search engine chooses to use the meta description, which is not always the case. Sometimes, copy in the body of the content is used; sometimes it’s a combination of body copy and the meta description.
Good:
Get our free Windows backup software now and prevent data loss. Quickly and easily
clone your hard drive. Download today — save headaches tomorrow!
Bad:
Myfreesoft offers Windows programs that help you maintain your Windows system.
We offer free software you can download today.
Meta keywords
Stuffing keywords into the meta keywords field was a common tactic back in the AltaVista days. Those days are long gone and so is “keyword stuffing” as an “SEO technique”. Some argue that you should still use meta keywords, while others strongly argue against it. The decision is yours, but if you do use meta keywords, make sure they correspond to the actual content on the page you’re using them on.
Good:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”backup, windows, clone, hard drive, free, download”>
Bad (drastic example but you get the idea):
<meta name=”keywords” content=”backup, windows, clone, hard drive, free, download,
coffee, hotels, airlines, cars, celebrities”>
Dynamic sitemap
A sitemap (usually an XML file in the root directory of your site called sitemap.xml) lists all the pages on your site you want crawled and includes information such as the date the page was last modified. If you’ve followed the guidance provided thus far, search engines should be able to easily crawl and index your site — with no additional work on your part. However, using an automatically generated sitemap is easy to implement in most content management systems and ensures that content which is not directly linked to from within your site will still be crawled and indexed.
Note: To exclude certain pages or directories for being crawled, you use a file called
robots.txt. Learn more about using the robots.txt file to exclude specific files or directories
from being crawled. Be aware that there are “aggressive” spiders that ignore robots.txt,
which means you’ll need to employ real security measures and access restrictions if
you really need to keep certain files from being crawled.
Learning more about SEO
If you follow the above guidance, it will help you boost your search engine rankings and hopefully drive additional traffic to your site. Although making your site content, architecture and URLs SEO-friendly is extremely important; by itself, it is not enough for you to rank highly for competitive terms. In order to do that, you need a large amount of quality (authoritative) inbound links to your site. We’ll cover “off-page” SEO tips for building links to your site (backlinks) in another article. Luckily for software developers, it’s a bit easier to get some authorative backlinks by distributing your software through download sites or portals.
For more resources to help you familiarize yourself with the basics of SEO, Google has a great starter guide that covers some of the key things you need to understand about search engine optimization. Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, also publishes great, short and extremely timely videos on YouTube about SEO (and other topics) which help dispel myths and will get you going on the right path.
In the meantime, there are a slew of great resources online for learning about SEO (besides the vast amount that Google offers). Here’s a short list of some great, trustworthy ones to help you get started and up your SEO knowledge.
- SEOMoz (they also have a huge list of SEO resources)
- Google Web Master Central
- Search Engine Land
- Search Engine Watch
- SEO Book
- Alltop SEO – aggregator of the top SEO resources
- Marketing Pilgrim
- YouTube Google Web Master Central Channel
- W3Schools
Until next time, definitely download a full-sized PDF or image of Search Engine Land’s recently released “Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors for an outstanding infographic representing what (currently) matters when it comes to SEO (both on and off-page).
Thanks for reading!
-The OpenCandy Team
