seo best practices for web developers

Technical Insight to Search Engine Optimization

IT Industry for 15+ years BA – Philosophy MBA/TM – Global e-Commerce SEO/SEM/SMO Manager Social Media Hound Internet Entrepreneur Website Designer/Developer

Shannon Steffenssteffen@sksdesigns.com

SKSDesigns

in/shannonsteffen

Facebook.com/SKSDesigns

http://www.sksdesigns.com

Search Engine Optimization is a process that makes your website more attractive to the natural listings on a search engine, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo, so that your website can achieve higher ranking or placement. Crawlers, aka spiders or robots, such as Googlebot, Slurp or

MSNbot are computer generated tools that search engines have to grab content from websites and bring them back to the search engine index.

What search engines CAN do: Read your HTML source code, text and links Keep their process secret

What search engines CANNOT do: Can’t read JavaScript, Flash images, AJAX or imbedded text images Can’t fill in forms or log into online accounts

Sitemap Every page listed in site map Add to sitemap in main navigation or footer navigation Note this is different from Google Sitemap All links on your site in basic link format Use link code: <a href=”http://www.website.com/page.html”

title=”keyword”>Keyword in Anchor Text</a>

XML Sitemap Located at root directory Submitted to Google Webmaster Tools

301 Redirect Used to condense homepage versions, redirect single page/file, SEF

URLs or redirect entire site.

404 Redirect Capture lost visitors

W3C Compliant Validate code at http://validator.w3.org/

Page File Size Max 150 kilobytes Before CSS, images, other attachments

Number of internal links Max 150 unique links per page

URL Parameters Max two parameters

URL Depth Max four parameters

① Title Tag

② H1, H2, H3 Tags

③ Keyword Tag

④ Description Tag

⑤ Image File Name & Alt Tags

⑥ Internal Link Tags

⑦ External Link Tags

⑧ Robots.txt File & Tag

⑨ Meta Number Tag

⑩ Meta Country Tag

Write tags for every page of your website – specific to that page

Example:

<title>How to write a press release</title>

<meta name="description" content=”Learn how to write a press release by using our press release checklist." />

<meta name="keywords" content=”how to write a press release same press release checklist distributing a release to the media pr publication relations" />

<meta name="rating" content="General" />

<meta name="distribution" content="General" />

<meta name="revisit after" content="7 Days" />

<meta name="Robots" content="index,follow”/>

<meta name="Author" content=”XYZ Marketing Company" />

<meta name="copyright" content="©2010 XYZ Company" />

<meta name="verify-v1" content=”bibdwq87ndnaou9ueqsnkyi" />

Site Audit Phase 1: Sitemap SEO audit completed Phase 2: Site navigation audit completed & navigation

spider-able

Keywords Keyword research completed for site by specialist

Keyword Density Approximately 250 words of text & 10% keyword density

on key landing pages

Slow loading site Site should load in 30 seconds of less

Black listed Don’t use spamming or black hat tactics such as hidden text

Mirror site Don’t use mirror – same information as your website

Confused on domains Use 301 redirects (.htaccess file) to redirect www domains

Dynamic urls Rewrite structures if urls are too long

JavaScript Pull JavaScript and CSS files from external source

Google Webmaster Tools Use this free tool to check if there are any crawl errors on your site

ssteffen@sksdesigns.com @SKSDesigns on Twitter in/shannonsteffen on LinkedIn SKSDesigns.com Call 414-455-1286