Top 10 SEO tips
November 9th, 2008 by Peter SofocleousIn the last few years through trial and error I have found certain things that make a difference for Search Engine Optimasion (SEO).
- “Update your Homepage”
Your homepage is the most important page. If its identical every time a search engine comes back then a search engine will come back less often thus dropping your ranking. Adding a latest news feed on your homepage can do wonders for your ranking. Although your homepage is the most important the rest of the website should also be updated as often as possible. - “Content”
If you want to have a good ranking you need to give a search engine what it likes… That’s plenty of content to munch through. Again make sure your homepage has at least 200-300 words on it. For a search engine, information is king. The more relevant information your website has to offer the better your change of getting a good ranking. - “Relevancy”
Its important that you browser title, meta keywords, meta description, page heading, and page content all are relevant with each other. - “Linking”
A search engine needs to be able to get to every page on your website. A menu with the submenu hidden which expands means a spider needs to go several levels deep to get all the pages. Having all the links on the page and potentially using JavaScript to hide the sub menus is one way to get all your links on the top level. - “Webmaster Tools”
Google and Microsoft both provide free tools for managing your listings. One of the best things you can do is create an XML sitemap for your site and then use the tools to tell the search engine where to find it. (Google Webmaster tools, Microsoft Webmaster Centre) - “Structure”
Think about how your page is layed out. A page should be coded in a logical manor. Starting with Logo, menu, H1, content, H2, content, H2, content, H3, content etc. - “Accessible Pages”
Making your page accessible not only means it can pass WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) tests but it also gives a search engine a lot more information about your page. For example an image without an ALT tag is useless to a search engine. Links should have titles on them. Tables should have summaries on them. Basically every none text element should have a text description. Get a report on your website. - “Validate your Website”
Goto W3C to analyse HTML and CSS. Here are the links to the W3C’s HTML Validation Tool and CSS Validation Tool. - “Optimise”
Every page should be unique. That means, the browser title, the heading, the meta keywords, the meta description, and even the content should be unique. Optimise each and every page. - “Friendly URLs”
Assuming your server supports this, its a must. It can turn an ID based URL into something readable. This also increases the pages relevancy for a search engine. For example a page called /index.php?id=123 gives you nothing for search engines however with Apache’s Mod_Rewrite that page can look like /contact_us/ which gives search engines something extra to rank the page on.
