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Web Design Checklist for SEO

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Having been involved in web design and web development as well as online marketing for many years I have picked up and seen first hand how good SEO skills and careful employment of these skills can really help improve search engine ranking. Here is a list of a few SEO tips to keep in mind when developing new sites, writing new content or planning your next article.

Title and Meta tags

Meta tags are search engine readable tags that should be present on every page of every website. There are three main meta tags that are important for SEO and there are guidelines for each that will help Google and other search engines rank your pages.

Title Tag

The title is the most important meta tag for search engine optimization. It should be no longer than 65 characters, and be descriptive, and attractive, containing your important keywords, and describe well your web site's purpose.

Description Meta Tag

The description is used by search engines when indexing your site. Sometimes search engines use this tag as the description to display in the search results. The descriptions on different pages within your site should be unique, describe the page and be no longer than 200 characters.

Keywords Meta Tag

The keywords meta tag is the least important of the meta tags but can help point out to the search engines the keywords that are most relevant to your page or site. Keywords should be unique, contain no stop words and be no longer than 150 characters.

HTML Attributes

HTML attributes are search engine readable elements that help to describe to the search engine what a particular item may be and what its relevance is to the site or page.

ALT Attributes

As search engines cant look at pictures in the same way that we do ‘alt’  attributes should be used for every image on the site. An alt attribute is a short description of what the image is and can be used to help build up the keyword density of your pages.

Title Attributes

Title attributes are used on links, both internal links and external links. Every link should have a title attribute and the text used should describe the destination page. As with the alt tags this can also help build up the keyword density of your pages.

HTML Hierarchy and best practises

HTML is the code that a browser reads and this code tells the browser exactly how to display the data on the screen. It is important that certain standards are met and that a clear page hierarchy is achieved as these both make it easier for the search engines to read and interpret your pages.

H1, H2, H3, H4, P  tags and lists

The “H” in the tags above refers to “Heading”, the number that follows each “H” is an indication of the weight of importance that each heading has. Each page should have only one H1 tag and this should closely reflect or repeat what is in the “Title” meta tag as this is the most important element of the page. Subheadings, paragraphs and lists should each follow the page hierarchy and use the correct tag respectively.

Tables

Tables should be used only to display tabular data and should not be used structurally within the page. Table cells should also never contain another table. This is referred to as “Nesting” tables and can have a negative impact on SEO.

Keywords and Content

Search engines return results to their users when the user searches for specific keywords or phrases. You will most likely have a very good idea of what keywords you are trying to target and how you would like people to find you when searching on the Internet. Search engines rank and index your site based on the content of your pages so it is very important that your pages contain the keywords and phrases that you are trying to target so that they will see your pages as relevant to their users searching for these terms.

What counts as content

To a search engine the readable content of a page is not only the text that is displayed to the user but also the title tag, meta tags, alt and title attributes, filenames and URLs. All of these things are readable content and all are there to be exploited to help raise the “keyword density” of your pages.

Keyword Density

Search engines, as part of their reading of your pages, look at the content and identify the occurrence and volume of your keywords and phrases. It is recommended that a page dedicated to a specific word or phrase should have, if possible, a keyword density of around 5%. This means that roughly 5% of the content should be made up of your keyword or phrase. This practise makes it abundantly clear to the search engines that the page they are reading is most relevant to this term.

Choosing Keywords

When choosing the keywords you want to target you should bear in mind the popularity and competitiveness of that word of phrase. It will be far harder to get a good listing for a very generic term than a specific or specialist term. Popularity also plays a big part in this process: if there are thousands of other websites competing for position on your chosen terms then gaining a good position will be much harder than a more localised or unsaturated term.

Cross Linking Content

When a search engine arrives at  a page on your site they read the content and look for all the links on your pages. Having found a link to another page within your site they then know to come back and have a look at that page and so on. This is effectively how the Internet gets indexed and how search engines look for websites and pages. Making the most of this practise is important as your pages will be seen as more relevant if they link to other relevant pages within your site. Linking from within blocks of text is a very good thing as it gives more weight to both the destination page and the text itself.

Backlinks to your site

Backlinks are links to your site from other websites on the Internet. Search engines keep track of the number of external sites that link back to your site and they use this as a way to decide how popular and relevant your site is. The better the quality and popularity of the source of the link the more impact it will have on your site. The quality of a page can be quantified by “PageRank” so the better the PageRank of the page that links to you the more benefit this link will have for your site. There are various linking strategies and ways to obtain backlinks such as reciprocal linking and social media.

PageRank

“Google PageRank” is a scoring system developed and operated exclusively by Google to give every page on the Internet a score of between 0 and 10. The higher the score the better so a PageRank of 10 is the best but Google don't even give themselves a score of 10 and the high scores are notoriously hard to achieve.

Social Linking

Social websites such as blogs, facebook.com, twitter.com and youtube.com are more popular than ever and more and more businesses are seizing the opportunity to make their presence through these channels. Not only do these platforms provide a loyal preexisting user base to market yourself to, they can also serve to generate more backlinks to your site. All of these different sites do, however, require a certain amount of commitment and it can take time to build up your followers or fans.

PPC or Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click advertising or PPC for short is one of the most popular and cost effective methods for delivering targeted traffic to your website. As the name suggests you only pay once someone has clicked on an advert which will link directly to your site. You as the advertiser have complete controll over how much you are willing to pay for each visitor and for what keywords you would like to appear in the search results of your chosen search engines. Google Adwords is by far the most popular as Google have the largest user base and they also invented the concept and have been doing it the longest. You can expect to pay from as little as £0.01 per click but for competitive terms you will obviously have to pay more.

The PPC system in Google uses two factors to determine your position in the sponsored links served to a user, they are the maximum bid amount you are willing to pay and also the “Quality Score” which is a score Google give each add based on the text of the ad, the landing page and the keyword or phrase you have chosen to use. The better the score the higher up the list you may go and the minimum price Google will charge you is reduced as well.

Error Pages

Error pages are very bad for your site's ranking and SEO. If a search engine comes to an error page either from its own index or by following a link it will not find what it is expecting and the chances are that it will find no content at all. This is obviously very bad as your website will not, in the eyes of the search engine, be providing the 100% user experience that they are trying to deliver to their users and so your site will be marked down. There are a number of different error pages that each have different codes but the most common is caused by a link that points to a page that does not exist. Broken links, as these are called, are not only bad for SEO but they are bad for your own site's users as they may click on a link expecting to find some content and instead receive an empty page. Error pages should be rectified as soon as possible to prevent any negative impact on your ranking.


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