Search Engine Optimization Tips
1. Keyword Research
2. Website Structure
3. Meta Tags
4. Content Optimization
5. Link Building
Website Structure
Developing a clean, easily accessible site will not only be pleasing to your visitors, but it will aid the search engine spiders in crawling your whole web site. It will also enable faster page loading times. Here are a few things to keep in mind when building your web site.
1. Separate Presentation and Content: Using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is always a good idea for a couple of reasons. It separates the styling code and the content making it easier to manage from a developers perspective and it also keeps your web page size to a minimum, which increases page load time.
2. Navigation: Easy, text-based navigation is desired. When using image based links make sure to use the "alt" attribute
Alt usage on images and image links:
Avoid using javascript in your link structure.
3. Sitemaps: A good practice is to use a sitemap, a page that contains links to all the pages on your website. Ideally it should list all the internal pages from your site. If your have a very large site with a lot of content, try breaking it down to the top-level, general categories and ensure that no page is more than 2-3 clicks from the homepage.
4. Search Engine Friendly URL's: URL's generated by other database driven programs, Content Management System's (CMS), etc often produce "ugly" URL's.
Dynamic URL example:
Search engines have greatly improved the way they crawl dynamically generated URL's, however they still have problems with the ones that contain a large number of parameters. One work around is to use Apache's mod_rewrite, which can change the way your dynamic URL's are displayed. Let's look at the above example again. Not only does it make it awkward for the spiders to crawl, but it's also not very user friendly. Here is a mod_rewrite rule that would make the page "appear" to be static:
The new URL would appear like this:
http://www.mysite.com/index/category/Music/product /CD/
Much easier to read for the search spiders and end users.
6. Other factors to consider: Don't use frames. Frames confuse search engine spiders as they do not know which page to rank. It also hurt's your ability to deep link content.
Limit use of Flash. If you're set on building a flash-based site, here are some tips.
Embed flash components into an HTML page
Create a mirror HTML page. This will give users the option of browsing your site in Flash or straight HTML.
7. Valid Code: You can use W3C Markup Validation Service to verify that your HTML conforms to W3C standards. Using the W3C Validation service can show you what part's of your site appear to be "broken". Broken code can lead to your site displaying incorrectly across various web browsers. It can also hinder spiders from completely crawling and caching your web site.
You should also use the W3C CSS Validation Service to verify correct use of CSS.
