How to make a great SEO website

People are always asking what makes a website great and how to optimise it for maximum search engine visibility and top ranking results.

Here I have listed some points on what you should consider in pre-design for a website in terms of SEO

• Have a good structure that flows through the site. A CMS like WordPress is optimised well in terms of structure straight out of the box. Make your template XHTML – keywords in header tags are seen and used by search engines.
• Get normalised (canonicalised) and SEF, keyword targeted URL’s from the start. Make sure that there are 301′s from non www to the www address and that all index.php / index.asp / index.html, etc all have 301′s to the root address. The reason for this is to encourage people to link to the homepage URL (meaning that will get all the link juice/credit) and also this helps stop duplicate content. If you are using a well known CMS then install a SEF URL plugin / component that will use 301′s. Get your keywords in the URL’s and use hyphens to separate words (that’s what Google do so best to follow suit).
• Page speed is now a factor used by Google to rate a site – use gzip and get your page speed loads to 1 second (a great way to improve on page speeds is to use firefox’s extension “firebug” and the Google extension “page speed” that adds onto firebug).
• Good menu structure – have the important pages on your site in the menus on all pages – this helps the search engines spiders crawl the site and will see those pages as more important than the deep linked pages.
• Sort the content out – make the content on all the pages user friendly (short, interesting paragraphs) and hopefully you should be putting the pages keywords in naturally as you write it.
• Unique, relevant keywords in the page titles and META descriptions of every page on the site.
• Alt text and Title text for all the images and links on the site.
• Make the design look great – these days websites with dated designs are often thought of negatively by viewers. The more viewers like your site the more links it will get – the more links from relevant and well ranked sites, the better search engines will rank you. Display marketing and call to actions are a must for sales and e-commerce sites!
• Blog! I cannot think of any site that would not benefit from a blog on the site. Update it regularly and have comments (moderated if necessary) with social media sharing links. WEB 2.0 is a must for all sites that want to move forward with the internet. Links get generated and users get to interact with your site.
• Search engines these days have sitemaster tools where you can tell them how to index your site. Utilise these tools early on – submit sitemaps and robots files. Use Google’s webmaster tools to tell you any problems about your site.

Hope this helps all you budding new web designers with SEO.

Oh and almost forgot – one-way links – the key to being ranked highly for competitive keywords! Get the links built through forums, articles, sites that may like to link to your relevant and interesting site and use social media to get people to link to you (link baiting….).