If you have a basic site that needs some entry level SEO, or if you want to know how to make sure your website is search engine optimization friendly when it’s being optimised by another firm, then here are the fundamentals in our free SEO guide.
Meta Information
When a search engine robot turns up to take a closer look at your website, the meta information is weighted higher than the rest of the site and is a key indicator of a pages theme. The title should be short and precise and only contain keywords that are relevant to your page theme. The description is just that, a descriptive blurb detailing the page contents.
Clean Code
No search provider will like to see a load of old rubbish code clogging up the site. By rubbish code we mean lots of page breaks, any text that has been pasted directly from applications like Microsoft Word, and the awful mess that is associated with Microsoft Front Page software.
Alt Tags
Whenever a picture is placed on a site, any good SEO Guide will need to remind you that spiders won’t see this image the way me and you would! They just see the link in the html to the directory location of the image, but that’s not it. We have a chance to explain to them what it is in the image, and this should always be present in the form of an alt tag.
Site Map
To help the spider get around and through your site, a sitemap will show them the way round. Just in case they cannot and don’t want to go through the normal navigation route, this is the proper way to list your pages.
Friendly URL’s
There is no point filling your web address URL’s with daft extensions like “cat67=?&discount%20shoes”. It looks bad in the results when potential customers are browsing, and these days there are easy solutions to having friendlier layouts throughout the main pages and the search results as well.
Internal Linking
Your pages with results on need to also link through to other related pages that offer similar products, this helps the visitor and also SEO.
Keyword Density
Don’t fill a page with the chosen phrases, have genuine great content that is aided by a handful of the chosen words for the page theme.
Code to Text Ratio
If your web page is 100kb and 99kb of this is links and images, then you are doing something very bad indeed. At least 10% of a page should be text only, and we regularly aim for 25% and over.
Number of Links
A suitable number of links in a footer and in the main body would be around 20 per one unit of page rank, this is our estimate and guideline target only but seems to work fine and we have never been penalised for having too many hyperlinks in one page.
Tags: SEO