Posted on: 23 May, 2009
Search engine optimisation. SEO. This has to be one of the largest concerns for every person who wants to attract traffic to their website. For the most part people seem very confused about SEO and I don’t blame them. An army of ‘SEO specialists’ has risen on the web and only a small percentage have anything worthwhile to contribute. Some are preaching practices that are no longer effective, others are borderline spammers who might get your site banned from the search engines altogether if you are unfortunate enough to have employed them. I’d like to state right now that I am not a SEO specialist. I build usable sites on the web, and want people to be able to find them. The following advice is intended to make you aware of the SEO considerations that are actually important when planning a web project. If you are undertaking a massive web project with an enormous budget and require detailed SEO advice I can recommend http://seomoz.org as an excellent source of information and one of the reputable SEO specialists out there. Otherwise I would advocate a ‘design first’ strategy. If you feel that you need further SEO refinement at a later date, then you can always come back and do that. If you cut corners on budgeting for the actual design and delivery of your project, then you will most likely be left with a disappointing site that nobody will want to visit anyway. So without further ado here is my list of SEO tips for new web projects.
This is the single most important factor in optimising a site for the search engines. Search engines love original content, and more importantly people love it too. The single biggest factor in rating well with the search engines is having as many genuine endorsements of the sites content as possible. These genuine endorsements come in the form of links. If the site contains compelling and original content, you will give people a reason to link to it. This is important because not all links are created equal in the eyes of the search engines, and they have extremely sophisticated ways of telling whether a link has been given to a page as a genuine endorsement of it’s content or as part of a scheme to falsify the popularity of the page. Attempts to falsify a pages popularity or worth are dealt with harshly by the search engines, sites found to be attempting to gain an advantage by dishonest means are either heavily penalised or banned from the search engines listings entirely. There will always be a few people trying to cheat the rankings, but implementing these practices is not advisable for any legitimate site wishing to establish itself for a sustained period of time, the energy would be better spent writing compelling original content, and then letting people know about it.
Not all URL’s are born equal. Google and many of the other search engines prefer clean and clear URL’s to the kind that is often output by many dynamic websites.
For example:
http://awebsite.com/index.php?pid=3086251&id=93118395498 equals bad!
http://awebsite.com/articles/web-friendly-seo/ Is far better.
The second example looks more appealing to the users of the search engine, it also has several technical advantages:
Ensures that the page is indexed correctly by the search engines.
Passes some useful clues about the content of the page to the search engine and the user.
Format agnostic. This is a fancy way of saying that URLs formatted in this way do not rely on any one kind of programming language or file format. This is useful from a SEO perspective as future changes to the way that the site is built do not have to impact on the links already indexed by the search engines.
It is preferable to use dashes instead of underscore in URLs. Although eventually this may be rectified, and the difference between using one over the other is decreasing, at present dashes still have the upper hand. The reason that dashes makes a difference is that some search engines (including Google) will treat the underscore as a character within the word. Dashes on the other hand are treated as a space between words. The geeky programmer term for this is a delimiter.
So for example
http://mywebsite.com/new_articles/web_friendly_seo
would be read as containing the words “new_articles” and “web_friendly_seo”.
With dashes in the URL instead of underscores:
http://mywebsite.com/new-articles/web-friendly-seo
The words contained would be read as “new” “articles” “web” “friendly” and “seo”.
Why Google (and others) have chosen to configure things this way is not exactly clear. Whatever the reason, there is an advantage to using dashes so I recommend that you do so. Google’s advice on using dashes in URLs backs this up.
Most search engines decide to pack up and go home after browsing through the first few levels of a site. If all those amazing articles are buried below that, then they most likely won’t be indexed.
Think shallow and wide:
Not deep and narrow:
As I mentioned earlier, all search engines like unique content. In order to help the search engines recognise each of the pages in the site, each pages title and meta description tags should be unique. The title tag is the most important tag for each web page. Whatever is entered into this tag will be the heading for that page in the search engines. The title of each page should not exceed 66 characters in length, including spacing. The meta description tag contains the information that will be displayed in the search engines underneath the title. It should be as descriptive as possible and should not exceed 150 characters including spaces.
When people talk about sitemaps, they mean one of two things. First there is a HTML sitemap. This is a page on the website that displays the hierarchy of the site, aiding the user in finding the content that they are looking for. Whilst useful this page will not have any great bearing on the search engines ability to index the site. The second kind of sitemap is an XML sitemap. This file is not intended to be viewed by people, it is a structured list containing information about every page in the website. This list is read by the search engines and helps them to find all of the pages in the site so that they can be indexed.
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