With the reams of information that’s available on the Internet about Search Engine optimisation, it’s sometimes hard to know what to adopt and what to ignore. We’ve compiled a concise checklist of our top 5 quick-wins which get results. This is power SEO. Enjoy.
- Title Tags
The humble title tag is often ignored or applied uniformly on every page of a website. This is a classic school boy error. As one of the most important elements on a webpage, it still holds a special place in Search Engine algorithms.
Keep the tag to fewer than 12 words, make it unique and descriptive for each page, use keywords, and save any branding for the end.
- i-Frames
i-Frames are pretty evil. Yes, they have their place in layout and can look relatively cool, but from a Search Engine perspective, they can be a little hellish. Although content in i-frames is indexed, and possibly ranked, by search engines – if a user clicks on one of the i-frame results they’ll wind up on a page with no navigation and no contextual information. Not ideal from a usability perspective, so we advise avoiding them wherever possible.
- 301 Redirects
If you are wanting to permanently redirect a page to another, the correct redirect is a 301. This means a permanent redirect. 302 indicates a temporary move and does not transfer any of the old page’s Page Rank or link value to the new location. Similarly, if you have multiple domains (with the same content), you should 301 redirect them to one domain. This consolidation will help you avoid any potential cannonicalisation issues that may arise.
- Make sure your site is indexed
One of the best ways to up your online visibility, and hopefully the number of terms for which your site is found, is to get as many of your pages as possible into the Search Engine indexes. XML sitemaps tell Search Engines about your website. You should create one and submit it to the relevant Search Engines. This will enable them to crawl your site more effectively, and hopefully index more of your content. Another power tip is to make sure that you have a good user sitemap for your site. Google’s guidelines state that every page on your site should be linked to from at least one static text link. Some search engine robots have trouble following links in JavaScript, so it’s best practice to make sure that your entire site is accessible.
- Don’t underestimate the power of solid internal linking
You can strengthen pages in your site by linking to them from your home page. Internal links also count in Search Engine algorithms, and give Search Engines an idea of what your site is about. Be sure to use descriptive, keyword rich anchor text within your <a href> tags. These keywords tell Search Engines what the page they point to is about. You’re not trying to optimise your pages for “click here” and “read more”, are you?
Extra SEO tips
There’s a wealth of information available on XML sitemaps at www.sitemaps.org. You can check out the Google Webmaster Tools at www.google.com/webmaster for webmaster guidelines. Want to know how many pages you have in Google? Use site:www.yoursite.com in the search bar, and you’ll see the number of results at the top right of the page. You can see how many pages you have in the Yahoo! index at http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com