SEO done the right way.

A client recently asked for a quick overview of good SEO practises, so I thought I’d share them with all of you at the same time. It’s something on the rough side but you need this in place to get your website up in the top ranks of those major search engines out there. Well the first item being the most important. 

Landing pages or Homepage: It’s impossible to do a good job of optimizing your homepage for every possible term people might use to find your site. Think of it as a market place where every vendor is yelling the end result is of equal volume where nothing stands out. Plan instead to add a page to your site for each search term, heavily optimized for that term using all the tips below. 

Titles: The < title > tag, which sets the text displayed in the title bar of the browser window, is very highly rated by search engines as being indicative of the page’s content. The engines differ in how much of the < title > they index, but the general rule of thumb is that the first 60 or so characters are the most important.

Repetition: The search term should be repeated as many times as possible. It’s very important to use key words pertaining to the page as you see fit increasing the position of the page ranking in search engines.

Image Names: A necessity if you’re particular to a specific image naming as these play a vital role in determining the page search outcome as well. ‘Alt’ texting images (text appearing before the image downloads) can also define greater probabilities of showing up on Google Image search, enhancing search criteria.

Domain Names: Most of the things search engines look for center around trying to determine the content of a page based on the text it contains and the ‘Meta’ information that surrounds it. The more difficult it is to fake the ‘Meta’ data, the more stake placed in it. Some of the hardest to fake are the domain name and URL of a page, which makes them two of the more important tweaks you can make. It’s harder to optimize the domain name since you only have one for your whole site.

URL: The search term should ideally be part of the URL. I’ve always preferred exact link names as opposed page2_main.html it only confuses the search engine robots and causes your site to be badly structured.

Sitemaps: Way back in the early days of the web, Site Maps were actually a page on your site that showed people where all the other pages were, usually in some sort of graphical flow chart fashion. Most sites have grown considerably beyond being showcased on a map, but having said that it still provides a new lease on life thanks to web crawlers. Submitting a Sitemap file to the search engines helps them understand how to crawl and index all of the pages, including the frequency that they change.

Inbound Links: You want to encourage as many inbound links to your site as possible since they are factored into most search engine’s ranking algorithms as essentially counting as votes for the authoritativeness of your site. Almost all inbound links are positive, with the exception of some. You really want to focus on getting other sites to link to your landing pages with the right link text.

Meta Tags: These used to be all the rage in that you could define keywords for search engines to use in their indexing. That’s a pretty easy system to game (want to attract attention to an explicit site? Try keywords like “free money”), so they’re no longer nearly as valuable as they used to be. There’s a lot of discussion in the SEO community about how valuable they actually are, but the general conclusion is that you can’t go wrong by adding the keyword and description ‘Meta’ fields to your pages, and that they may even be used to display some of the information in search results.