It’s a myth that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is ridiculously difficult and for the professionals only. Anyone who can build a website has the ability to implement basic SEO recommendations to make sure their site is optimised for both the search engines, as well as for site visitors from a usability point of view.

Below are 10 recommendations which should be given some thought when building a website; however it’s surprising how many of these basic recommendations are ignored despite many of them simply being best practice for making a website as user-friendly as possible.

1)    Title tags and meta descriptions

Every page on the site should have its own unique title tag set which accurately describe the page’s content using the most relevant keywords (ideally those that you want the page to rank for). The meta description tag also gives you the chance to write a longer summary, and while search engine ranking algorithms pay little attention to this, it is still shown in the search results and therefore needs to be relevant to entice potential visitors to the site (just the same as with your paid search ads).

2)    Pay attention to your content
Search engines like text, and a page with no text and just a lot of images isn’t much use to them. Ideally pages should have at least 100 words on them, and of these, your chosen/target key phrases should be mentioned around 5 times, or in search terms the content should aim for a keyword density of 5%.  However, whilst this is useful to search engines, it’s vital that your content is still primarily written for site visitors and reads well, without coming across as spammy and keyword stuffed.

3)    Use the header tags
Put your page heading in an H1 header tag at the top of the page, as not only does it make it clear to the visitor what the page is about, but it also lets the search engines know they are headings.

4)    Name your pages, directories and images
Don’t just assign your pages random names such as 070235.html, instead name them based upon what they are about, for example susan-boyle.html.  The same goes for your site directory structure and the images which are used.

5)    Use image alt tags
The search engines may be clever, but they can’t see what’s in your images (at least not yet). Setting the alt text tells the search engines what it is, which is especially important if the image itself links through to another page on your site.

6)    Create a sitemap
If your site has lots of deep links it may take a while before the search engines index them all. Creating a sitemap makes these pages more accessible to both search engines and site visitors. Generally there are two types of sitemap worth considering; HTML and XML. HTML sitemaps are useful to the user and XML sitemaps are useful to the search engines. It is also beneficial to link your XML sitemap to your Google Webmaster tools account.

7)    Add  a robots.txt file
When search engines crawl websites the first thing they look for is a robots.txt file. This lets them know which pages to index and which to ignore. By creating this file you can prevent pages being indexed which contain duplicate content which would otherwise adversely affect your rankings. For example, Wordpress blogs are well known for their duplicate content, since posts appear on the front page and archives, as well as in multiple categories. However, using robots.txt it is possible to prevent the archives and category subfolders from being indexed.

8)    Use relevant anchor text
The text you use to link to other pages is an important factor in ranking algorithms and should ideally reflect the content it is linking to. Don’t believe in the power of anchor text? In 2004, George Bush’s White House biography ranked 1st on Google for the term “miserable failure”, all due to links from other websites containing the relevant anchor text.

9)    Internal linking
Besides from the sitemap, make sure you link to your most important pages from every page of your site. Most sites already do this by having site wide navigation down the left-hand side or top of the page. Historically, it was deemed useful to sculpture internal linking. This is done with the use of no follow on certain internal links to help channel “link juice”. However, recent comments from Google’s Matt Cutts at an SMX conference suggested that this is a worthless exercise.

10)    Fix canonicalization issues
Search engines see www.example.com, example.com/, www.example.com/index.html and example.com/home.asp as different pages and will attempt to display the best one. However, if you have links (both internal/external) pointing to different versions, then in effect the “link juice” is being diluted across duplicate content. 301 redirecting all traffic to one version of the page should give it a much better chance of ranking.

These tips provide some quick wins, but are only really the tip of the ice berg and there’s a lot more you can do to help boost your Search Engine Rankings, while continuing to improve the user experience for your visitors. It is essential to remember that your visitors’ experience is of paramount importance and should always be front of mind. It’s one thing driving traffic to your site, but the experience visitors receive when they arrive will ultimately decide if they convert or move on to your competition.

Good luck and if you need some help then you know where to find us!

Tags: dave lees, natural search

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Natural Search (SEO), Reputation Management, Top Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.