Search Engine Optimisation tips

A cheat sheet toward SEO happiness.

Posted by Paul Whitrow, 14th April, 2009 | Permalink | 2 Comments

Every time we build a website we want it to be successful. We want it to deliver and inform on all levels. Most importantly, we want it to get to the top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) for our targeted keywords.

Mention the words Search Engine Optimisation to those paying for getting the site built and they will break out in a cold sweat. Why? Because more than ever in the realm of SEO a little knowledge is dangerous. SEO has gotten a bad wrap over the years from unscrupulous individuals who try and convince us that they are the only people that can get you on page one of the Search Engines, and not only that, but they can keep you there... for a fee of course.

So naturally the customer expects the SEO expert to look like Gandalf or Harry Potter, and sprinkle magic SEO dust on their website for them, achieving incredible results instantly and making them rich beyond imagination, and rightly so as they have paid after all. But time and again these SEO experts fail to deliver, leaving the customer unhappy, out of pocket, and skeptical of SEO, making the job even harder for the rest of us.

With a little thought and understanding of the basic requirements and principles of designing for maximum ranking results, we can save the customer money and put a smile on their face as the see their site grow in the SERPS, with no extra outlay for SEO.

There is no excuse for not building the site correctly in the first place. Listed below are some guidelines and references to help you.

This is by no means a definitive list, more like a quick prompt to get the main issues across.

Semantically correct HTML

One of the biggest things you can do to enhance your ranking is to make sure that your underlying code is written correctly. Pay attention to header tags (h1, h2 etc) and their placement within the document hierarchy. Make sure all text is held within (at the very least) a paragraph tag. Make sure all tags are closed correctly where required. Use the correct tags for the correct purpose. It's a long list, but as someone once said, "if a job is worth doing, it's worth doing correctly". So take some time to look at and familiarise yourself with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 from the World Wide Web Consortium.

When designing a site, create the correct structure first, and then enhance with CSS and additional styling, that way when the search engines spiders your site, it will read the content in the correct order. For example, if you have a page about big red buses, then the first element on the page should be an H1 tag with that title, then the content of the page, followed by the menu and any other elements. Once you have the underlying code in place, you can position the elements using CSS. You can check how well you are coding by running your page through the W3C HTML Validator and correcting any errors it throws up. If possible try to code your site to the XHTML 1.0 Strict standards, but at the very least it should be XHTML 1.0 Transitional, as set out in the documentation for XHTML 1.0 The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (Second Edition).

Head

All Javascript and CSS should be externalised (kept in an external file) and called into the document in the HEAD section of your page. Additionally it would be wise to include document type declarations (usually the first line of the document above the head), language and character set instructions as well.

Meta data (keywords and description)

Keyword meta data is not quite so important as it used to be in the SEO world. However, it's still good practice to make sure that correct and meaningful keywords for the site and or page are used.

The description is what will be displayed under the main link in the search engine's results, so a proper and full description is very important. Try and think about what you would want to see, what would draw you into the site. E.g., on your information page about your big red busses you could have "Big Red Busses. A history and definitive resource of and for our beloved Big Red bus."

Title

Ensure that your title tag is filled in correctly on EVERY page. Make sure it accurately reflects the content of it's page. For example, it you have a page about big red buses, you would set your title as 'Information about big red buses' (or similar), and not just 'buses'.

By all means use your site name (or company name) in the title tag, but (and this is important) make sure that the page specific title appears first. For example, "Types of Busses - The Big Red Bus Company".

It may be worth writing the title tag after you have written the main content for the page, in the same way that authors often choose the title of a book after the book has been written. This allows for a broader view of the content.

Headers

There's several Header Tags, varying from most important (H1) to least important (H6). Your keyword (or key phrase) needs to be the first words in the first Header Tag, which should be an H1 tag. The tags should be used in order of descending importance, i.e., your first tag should be the H1 tag and each following tag should be in series, use next a single H2 tag or a series of H2 tags. Don't start with an H3 tag, then use an H1 tag etc. This will just confuse the engines about the relative importance of your site's content.

Content

Content is king, literally. The more you have the better, but make sure that it is tailored to your page. Come up with a list of around a dozen keywords and pass those to a professional copy writer, asking them to produce around 50 lines of content based on those keywords and the target area for your site. Don't be afraid to have LOADS of content as long as it is relevant. Basically, inform the visitor but don't waffle!

As a general rule of thumb, think about what is important to you when you search for information. Think how you interact with the search engine results, and wether those results meet your requirements.

First Paragraph

The first words of the first paragraph are very important. These should be the key phrase that you have identified for that particular page, followed by any other important information. Remember, humans scan documents and decide if they want to continue reading after just the first few lines, so catching their eye is paramount. A good copywriter can help with this.

Meaningful URLs

Try to make sure that your directories and or filenames accurately reflect the meaning, reason or purpose of the page itself. For example, an about us page could go in root/aboutus, or root/about-us, or root/aboutus.php, etc. any of these are acceptable and will enhance SEO, as Google also looks at the location and name of the files as it searches.

Google actually now declare that their engine is powerful enough to decode dynamic URLs (address with ampersands and question marks in them). However, I would much rather see a url with descriptive meaning to it (e.g. yoursite.com/articles/story-about-something) as opposed to one with characters and IDs (e.g. yoursite.com/?articleid=1234&category=5678).

I'm not aware of any restrictions or hard and fast rules about wether it's better to have the relevance attached to the directory name or the individual file name, so go with what's best for you.

Sitemap

Make sure your website has an accurate sitemap. You should include a link to EVERY page, including if possible all dynamically created pages, that you have in order to take full advantage of your sitemap. Google can then spider this page and get direct access to every other page from here.

Important: if the links in your sitemap end at directory level (ie,http://www.pwhitrow.com/blog) then ENSURE that you add a last forward slash to that link (ie,http://www.pwhitrow.com/blog /). Otherwise, Google will think that the URL is a redirect and will report errors in the sitemap.

Link up your sitemap from your home page. For best results, link to it from every page (I do this in the footer file that is included in every page).

If you're working with a frames site, not really recommended, then always place a link to the site map from within the noframes tags.

I recommend looking at sitemaps.org for some more informative reading.

Links

Your primary links should be plain text or graphics with your key phrases in the title attribute of the HREF tag. This may sound obvious until you consider that there are alternatives - Flash, Javascript, links made invisible by CSS effects, drop-down DHTML menus etc. Just try to keep things simple.

Be sure to use keywords in the link's anchor text and, if you use graphic links, use them in the alt attribute of the IMG tag.

If you're working on a site with several hundred pages, split the navigation up into several interlinking and categorised site maps. Try to keep the maximum number of links on any one page down to a hundred or so. You don't want to appear to be a link farm (see below)!

What you're trying to establish is a system of links that are clearly defined and easily negotiable by a search engine's spider. It's not enough to create great content, you have to make it easy for the engines (and visitors of course) to reach it.

Inbound links can make a world the difference to your rankings, so do take advantage of viral marketing tactics, such as subscribing to forums and posting your link in them, joining up to link exchangers with similar interests, and various other methods that are available.

However, do avoid Link Farming. This method is outdated and you will be penalised by the search engines if you try to employ this tactic.

Graphics (pictures)

Try and include the page's keywords in the image filename, but keep the filename brief. E.g. an-image-of-a-big-red-bus-carrying-passengers-along-the-road.gif is a bit verbose! Much better to just have a-big-red-bus.gif as the image name.

Image ALT attributes

Make sure that the ALT attribute of all images you use on the page are filled in correctly. For example, if you have an image of a big red bus, then the ALT attribute would read 'an image of a big red bus'. Don't be afraid to fully describe the image in the ALT part of the tag. Search engines use the ALT attribute as they cannot read the meta data directly from an image.

Domain Name

If you can, try and have the domain name of your site reflect the purpose of the site, but keep in mind that we as humans can tell that thebigredbus.com has four words in it (the big red bus) but search engines cannot. As we are not allowed to have spaces in domain names (at least not yet anyway) then the only other real option we have is hyphens, making our domain name now the-big-red-bus.com. However, be careful with this as long domain names with multiple words could be interpreted as artificial by the search engines and penalised accordingly.

Posted on Tuesday 14th April, 2009 at 11:29 am by Paul Whitrow, and filed under SEO