French Search Engine Optimization

By Author: Martin Wood
Total Articles: 1
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Search Engine Optimization (or SEO for short) is all about getting your website to appear high in the search results with Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines in order to attract more visitors to your website and generate more sales.

French Search Engine Optimization has the same objective, with a primary focus on google.fr, which is by far the most popular search engine in France.

To optimize a website in French, there are several essential stages and it's best to complete the first two before completing the third:

- Optimizing the content of your website for search engines.

- Design Optimization - increasing your chances of converting visitors into customers.

- French link building - generating high quality links to your website.

It used to be that search engines just looked at the metatags of a website (the Title, Description and list of Keywords which are ideally unique on every page of your site) and checked how many times the keyword appeared on the page. They now weigh up a lot more factors and also value incoming links to your website more than the actual content of your ...
... site.

On-site Search Engine Optimization

Start by choosing popular search terms (a good French Search Engine Optimization company will be able to provide keyword reports saying how many times different keywords and phrases are searched for).

If your site uses a Content Management System (e.g. Drupal, Wordpress or Joomla) or a template, then check that your theme or template uses a H1 code for the main tite / heading on the website. If you are viewing your site in a browser select ‘View Code' or ‘View Source' and find the title on a page.

You can then count the number of times the most important French keyword is used, it should be roughly:

- Once or twice for the H1 title and metatag title.

- Two or three times in the keywords metatag (as part of a phrase, e.g. for this article, you might include French search engine optimization, French SEO, French link building in order to use the word French 3 times.

- Once or twice in the description and any H2 or H3 titles (sub-headings).

- In about 10-15% of the links between different pages of the website.

- In the URL (web address of the page) e.g. French-search-engine-optimization.html is much better than page123.html.

- As about 3-7% of the text of the web page itself.

For good French grammar, there are often extra words in short phrases, e.g. ‘dans', ‘par', ‘a', etc, however when someone searches in Google, to save time, they're likely to miss out these words, therefore it may be worth not including these words for the titles on your site, in order to improve the French SEO.

Design Optimization

When visitors arrive at your website, in order to become a customer, they need to want to stay on your site. We call this process ‘Design Optimization'. This is the process of presenting an attractive and professional website to visitors, ensuring that navigation between pages is clear and that any ordering process or contact details are clearly visible, so that visitors don't have to ask the question ‘What am I meant to do here?'

French link building

The more high quality French links going to your website, the better your French Search Engine Optimization will be and the higher your site will appear with Google.fr and other French search engines. Valuable links can also generate hundreds or even thousands of visits from the links themselves.

The most useful links are from relevant websites with a high PageRank. Google often only counts the first 100 or so link on a page, so there needs to be under 100 links (ideally less). Links from directories and article websites are also useful, however these high PageRank links from relevant, popular mainstream websites will make the most difference to your position in the search results.

Looking for France SEO? French SEO Team offer a comprehensive SEO service to generate many visitors to your site. We optimize 20 different elements with our on-site SEO and French content writing service and build high quality French links to your website.