Summary: SEO – search engine optimisation – means ensuring that your site is ‘search engine friendly’. Search engines can find your site, find all of the content on the site, and add that content to their database. When people look for information about products and services like yours, you want Google to give them a link to your website. If this happens, you’ll get more visitors, and more visitors mean more potential customers.
The key to designing a search engine friendly site is to ensure that it is well structured, everything is well labelled, all pages can be reached, the content is good and it’s easy for the search engines to understand – and index – the site.
Step 1: Choose HTML/CSS
The very first consideration is what you’ll create your site in. Our preference is HTML and CSS. Contrary to popular opinion, it is possible to create a search engine friendly site in flash, but a lot of extra work is required. So unless you understand exactly how to do this, stick to HTML/CSS and avoid flash or javascript.
Step 2: Get your structure right
Look at how your site will be structured – plan this before you create any pages. You’re aiming to create a site that has is structured logically. So, group similar information into folders that are named appropriately. Don’t have too many folders within folders.
Your folders could be structured like this, for example:
microcars
bmw
daewoo
daihatsu
fiat
minicars
audi
citroen
daihatsu
fiat
compactcars
alfa
audi
Step 3: Name files and folders appropriately
The folder names in the above example are meaningful so will further help Google understand your content.
Your pages should also be appropriately named – for example:
http://www.yoursite.com/microcars/daewoo/daewoo-matiz.html
These keywords within the folder and file names suggest to Google that your pages are relevant to the keyword, and Google is more likely to display the page to people searching for this term.
If possible, avoid using dynamic pages e.g. where the URL contains a ? character. For example:
http://www.yoursite.com/microcars?page=daewoo-matiz.html
Not all search engines deal with these pages very well. If you have to use parameters, keep them short and use as few as possible.
Step 4: Link up pages with HTML links and appropriate anchor text
Make sure that all of your links are html links – don’t link to pages through images, flash or javascript. This is because Google cannot see links in images, flash or javascript and won’t find the page. Make sure every page is accessible from at least one text link.
Think carefully about the text you use on your links. For example:
<a href=“http://www.yoursite.com/microcars/daewoo/daewoo-matiz.html”>Daewoo Matiz</a>
This tells Google that the page is about the ‘Daewoo Matiz’. If instead you link using the words ‘Click here’ or ‘Read more….’, it tells Google nothing about your page. In the above example, ‘Daewoo Matiz’ is what we call the ‘anchor text’. When you’re building links on your site or to your site from other sites, the anchor text is really important for telling Google and other search engines what your page is about.
Step 5: Create a user site map
When you’ve finished making the site, create a site map for your visitors. This is a nicely organised list of all pages on your website. If you have a lot of pages, create several site maps that are linked up from a central page. So for example, you could have a site map for ‘micro cars’, a site map for ‘compact cars’, and a site map for ‘mini cars’, and then a main site map which links to these three maps.
Ensure that no other page on your site contains more than around 50 links. If it does, break the page down into smaller pages.
Step 6: Make your content useful
Looking now at your content, make sure it is genuinely useful content that people would want to read and want to link to. Think about what people might type to find your site. To help find this out, use Google’s keyword tool: www.google.com/sktool/
For example, using the tool, you can see that people looking for ‘compact cars’ also look for ‘small compact cars’. You can also see that a lot more people search for ‘compact cars’ than for ‘small compact cars’, so ‘compact cars’ is a better term to target – but you might want to include both phrases. Aim to use the phrase a few times on the page so that Google knows the term is important to your content, but ensure your content still reads naturally and is still genuinely useful.
Step 7: Get your meta tags right
On each page, pay attention to your meta tags. You have to fill in a <title> <description> and <keywords> for each page. Ensure your title is descriptive of the page, and put the key word or phrase that you’re targeting first. You should also get the key word or phrase as early as possible in your <description>. The <keywords> meta tag is less important nowadays (certainly so far as Google is concerned) but it is worth filling in as nobody knows exactly how every search engine works and it is still a valid meta tag. Again, put the key word or phrase that you’re targeting first.
Step 8: Get your alt tags right
Look also at your <alt> tags – these are your image tags. You need to ensure you accurately describe the image. You also should name your image appropriately, e.g. daewoo-matiz.jpg rather than image001.jpg. Again this helps Google understand what your image is about.
Step 9: Validate and test
Check your site carefully for broken links – Xenu is a great free tool for doing this – http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html.
Ensure you’ve used correct HTML tags. You can validate your HTML using this tool: http://validator.w3.org/
Check how your site looks in a number of browsers, including Internet Explorer and Firefox. You should also download Lynx and check the site in that (http://lynx.isc.org/) as this is how most search engines view your site. Ensure all the pages can be reached using this browser.
Step 10: Speed up!
Check your site speed – there are various free tools online for doing this – Page Speed (http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/) is a good add-on you can use if you’re a Firefox user. Google values a faster site because it improves the quality of the web. Faster sites will rank better in Google. Don’t just test by loading the website itself (and not using a tool) because your internet speed will affect the load time – you need to see how well the site will perform at many connection speeds. Some people still use a 56k connection, believe it or not!
One final tip…. no sneakies!
Finally, make sure before you launch your site that you haven’t employed any sneaky techniques that Google can easily detect and may punish your site for (including delisting your site altogether). These include:
- Hidden text (example: white or pale text on a white or pale background). You might do this to try and stuff in some keywords to make Google think your page is about a particular topic.
- Hidden links (same as above – white or pale text on a white or pale background).
- Cloaking or sneaky redirects.
- Pages stuffed with keywords that are essentially useless.
- Pages with lists and lists of keywords.
- Pages, subdomains or domains with duplicate or very similar content.
- Pages that install software on the user’s PC when they visit the page (aside from genuine software download pages where the user requests to download something!)
- Doorway pages, splash screens etc with little or no content
If you have been already using any of these techniques and you find your site does not get indexed by Google or disappears from the rankings, you can correct the issues and submit your site for reconsideration: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35843.
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said at 8:22 am on July 22nd, 2010
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