SEO: The Importance of Mechanics

In our last article, we looked at ways to increase your hits and thereby increase your ranking. In addition to article length, updating frequently, and search terms in additional places, this article will look at the importance of mechanics.

Mechanics

Good mechanics increases readability which then increases your ranking because your readers will typically stay longer. For example:

• Don’t start consecutive sentences with the same word.
• Write in active tense, not passive. No more than 10% of the sentences should be written in passive voice.
• 30% of the sentences should contain transition words.
• The number of words following each subheading should not exceed 300 words.
• Make sure your paragraphs are not too long.
• No more than 25% of the sentences should contain more than 20 words.
• Paragraphs should start with the most important sentence first.
• Order your topic. There are different types of ordering: thematic (ordered on topic, aspect, theme), chronological (old-new), problem-solution(s) (first you introduce the problem and follow it with possible solutions), or didactic (easy-hard).

If you are looking for ways to improve your mechanics, check out the series by Amanda Cabot on L.A. Sartor’s webstie .

We’ve looked at what search engine’s love, but we need to be wary of what they don’t.

Search engines hate

Search engines hate:

• Graphics that do not include descriptions
• Frames – Search engines can’t necessarily see everything inside of a frame.
• Flash animations – These files cannot be indexed by most search engines. Google can read it, but Macs and mobile phones detest them.
• Duplicate contents at different URLs – Delete old versions of replaced pages. Even though they may be archived, search engines may just try to index these replaced pages and decrease your ranking because of duplicates pages.
• Avoid splash pages – usually a website loses its readers whenever a click is required. Although splash pages typically have beautiful animations or images, there is no navigation or content. If you want to use rich media on a splash page, you will want to include a regular HTML link to a page that’s text based for searches. The easiest way to go is to avoid splash pages altogether.

Next month we’ll end this series with a discussion of website topics.

(C) 2019 Karen Van Den Heuvel Fischer