Best SEO Techniques For Top Rankings

This free guide is to help you implement the basics of SEO on your website…

SEO Guide: SEO (search engine optimisation) is, believe it or not,  all about common sense, content and links.

1. BASIC ON-SITE SEO TECHNIQUES

Below are basic On-Site SEO techniques that should be applied to every website at its creation, or when you take it on to optimise it for search engines and for users.

Keep in mind that these points are aimed at search engines and users, with white-hat being the key.

This guide is aimed at helping SEO and also users on your website. This is a great starting point for any website, and after these points are achieved then display marketing (call-to-actions, etc) and social media marketing can be addressed….

Choose the Right Domain Name

• Having your keywords in the domain name certainly influences the ranking decision by the search engines. However it is not absolutely necessary to have this, just nice if you can. It is one of the many factors search engines look at, but it can work against you if your domain name starts getting too long and full or hyphens (-), as no one will remember the  URL. Plus you may find the url you want is already taken so you have to start thinking up clever alternatives. Keywords are a plus, but don’t compromise on the user friendliness of the name.

Internal Linking Menu’s

• Make sure all your websites pages have a clear menu structure that link together. This helps the search engines index your site and also makes the site more user friendly. A good internal linking structure can really make the difference for the spiders crawling your website.

Breadcrumb Menu

• Maybe not necessarily a search engine must, but this really does help users navigate your site (remember making the site user friendly can be the difference between a conversion or someone going back to the Google search and clicking the next result). An example of a breadcrumb menu is above.

Sitemap Page

• Have a sitemap page for your website, even if other people have told you that it is not as necessary any more.  This is basically a page with every internal page shown and linked to. Descriptions are not necessary as long as the link text says what the page is. This may be an older method for sites and if you have a good internal linking structure then this certainly may not be necessary, but it doesn’t take to much to do on small sites or sites on a CMS like wordpress or joomla, so what’s the harm.

Sitemap XML File

• Use a free sitemap generator site, Google / Yahoo / Bing generator or write it yourself. The sitemap is an xml file that sits in your home directory and tells the search engine your sites pages, the change frequency (when to recheck the page), the priority of a page (“Home Page” is 1.0 whilst “About Us” may be 0.80). Open source CMS’s like WordPress and Joomla have some fantastic auto xml-sitemap generator plugins that are free. Again if you have a good internal linking structure then this is not always necessary but all the webmaster tools ask for the location of it and also you can enter more detailed information like the priority of certain pages (can be auto set on CMS plugins) and images, etc.

Robots file

• A robots file tells the search engine if they should send their “robots” to auto find a page or directory in your site. The easiest way to manage this is by having a “robots.txt” file sat in your home directory which tells the search engine what to do. Use a free robots file generator of write it yourself (Google webmaster tools can write it for you).
• Most sites will auto allow all pages. Also put a link to your sitemap.xml location in the robots file to help other search engines. Most websites need a robots.txt file in order to block the search engines from scanning unnecessary content, like the wordpress wp-admin folder.

Search Engine Friendly URL’s

• A must these days. Do not have any ? or = in your URL’s. Basically aim to get a url as easily rememberable as possible and put the webpage’s keyword in the url, e.g. instead of “www.spottedpanda.com/section2/?=queryfishjuPART4=results27263″ you should have “www.spottedpanda.com/seo-explained”. Obviously a domain name with your primary keyword is the best (e.g. www.cheap-iphones.com) but usually the best keywords are taken, so we can put them in the rest of the URL, i.e. www.exampleurl.com/cheap-iphones.
• There has to be a point where you say that the domain name is just too long and user unfriendly (www.really-cheap-iphones-galveston-texas.com = not the best domain name). This is why using SEF URL’s you can put the keywords into the url, as well as on the page and META.

XHTML W3C Validated & CSS Validated

REVISED:


• Firstly; Amazon, Google, eBay and all the other big boys are NOT validated. It is very hard to get to 100% validation if you have a website with any special features at all. Validating your website only helps to make sure it will work in future browsers and also be accessible to special software’s.  Google themselves have said that they do not take into account the validation of your website. However if your website is very bad on the validation side then maybe the Google spiders can’t make it through all the content…..so try and validate the majority of the code, especially where the text you want to get indexed is.
• To check your site to see if it is XHTML validated use the world wide web consortium at http://validator.w3.org/. Keep in mind validating your website is not essential and won’t help SEO massively, but helps make sure your website will be viewed correctly on all browsers and monitors for the future (user optimization).
• CSS = Cascading Style Sheets. Basically this is the external style sheets that define the way your site looks (most sites these days have external style sheets as apose to internal code). Similar to above, it is good practise and also if the css is valid then different screen resolutions tend to display better.
• Check you code at http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/. Again this is not essential for SEO but it helps from an accessibility point of view and for future proofing.

Page Loading Times

• Google now takes page loading times into account for determining page rankings. Basically Google have the nice idea of speeding up the web – which most people would agree with.
• Imagine a website takes less than a second to load. The user is happy as he/she does not have to wait (no-one has patience with websites) and the information is given to the user fast and efficiently. If a user has to wait 10 seconds for a page to load chances are they will say “stuff this”, press the back button and go to the next search result where that site won’t have the cheek to make her/him wait so long.
• Consider Gzip for all you pages, JS and CSS. Also reducing all image sizes by changing them to gif or flattened png. Sorting your cache out is also a must. A brilliant tool to speed to tell you how to speed up your webpages is the firefox add-on “firebug” – get it at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843, and then get Google’s add on of “Page Speed” at http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/.
• Obviously the server you are on can have an affect on the sites speed. If you find that the server is just too slow then try and ask your web host to move it to a faster one (then may only charge a small amount extra per year).



Page Sizes – try to be under 100kb

• If a page is too big then not only will it take a while to load but also it may not load correctly in a users browser. Reduce all image file aizes by changing the format, e.g. change from bitmap to gif.
• Page sizes are obviously linked with Page Speed – something that Google takes into account these days in their effort to speed up the internet.

Limit Outbound URL’s (max 70)

• Your site may be penalised if you have too many outbound links. A search engine may see you as a spam site – this is very bad! Keep out bound links beneath 50. 50 to 100 is pushing it a little.

Webmaster Tools Submission

• Get your site setup and verified on Google, Yahoo and Bing. This helps to get your site indexed and gives you an abundance of information. They will give you either a verification code to put in your sites code or a verification file to upload to you home directory. Google will give you alot of information on its findings on the site and how you can improve it. Google Webmaster Tools - Yahoo Site Explorer - Bing Webmaster Center

301 Redirect or Link Rel Canonical Tag

• There are currently 2 acceptable ways of redirecting a website page to another page. The older (but still very useful) method is the 301 redirect. Apparently you lose around 20% of your “link juice” with this method, but at least that means you can redirect users and search engines to the correct URL without completely losing your link juice from the other websites linking to that page.
• In terms of duplicate content (happens alot on websites, especially with SEF URL rewriting methods), the best way is the link rel canonical tag that goes in your “head” section. Imagine you have 3 URL’s to the same address, but due to one reason or another you cannot use a 301 redirect to send users to the correct one. The Link Rel Canonical tag would tell the search engine which page is the correct one, and most search engines use this tag now very effectively.
• 301 redirects are still the best to use on non-www to www rewrites and in other places where you want to “force” the user or search engine to the redirected page, but always keep the link rel canonical tag in mind!

Analytic’s Installed

2. KEYWORDS, CONTENT, TITLE’s, META TAGS, INTERNAL LINKS AND IMAGES

Deciding your keywords is vital to any successful SEO website. Keywords are the text that users type into a search engine query to find what they want. Keywords should differ from one web page to the next. “Keyword Stuffing” is black-hat and should be avoided. Improving “Keyword Density” is the key. Optimising those keywords on each page is the next step…

Great  Content = King!

• Make your pages content UNIQUE, PERSONALISED AND INTERESTING TO THE USER. Get your pages KEYWORDS in the content (when writing the content this should be easy as the content should be based around the keywords, i.e. a page with a keyword of “Picture Frames” should have content talking about the subject matter, and the keyword should inevitable come up a few times).
• Remember search engines love unique content that it thinks users will want to read. Make all your page’s content different and unique (don’t just copy from Wikipedia!).
• Avoid keyword stuffing (don’t be black hat – don’t get penalised or worse – banned), in other words don’t constantly repeat a keyword or put repeatedly in the websites code as this will not help you.

Keyword Personalised URLS’s

• Get your main keyword into the url – search engines index url’s and will use them for keywords. Separate each word with a hyphen or underscore, e.g. www.spottedpanda.com/seo-explained

Keyword Personalised Title Tags (set in the Head section of the website code) (80 characters max)

• The title tag is still relied upon by search engines not only for what the page is about but also to display it to the user on the search engine query. Title tags should be personal and unique to each page on your site. They should be in good english (or whatever language you are using), have some keywords in there and be personal and unique to each page.

Keyword Personalised META Description

• The META Description tag is still used by search engines to display the page description to the user and to sometimes to find keywords and content. Same as above – unique and personal to each page but remember this is a short description to tell the user what is on the page and entice them in. Length is not a big issue but remember search engine tend to show the first 150 characters of the description, so there is not much point in writing a short essay for each page. Try and keep it under 200 characters so as to condense the information and fire some keywords in there, but remember DO NOT KEYWORD STUFF!.

Keyword Personalised META Keywords

• META Keywords tag is not used very much these days by search engines – BUT – they are very useful for you to use. Put the keywords you have selected for each page into this tag and then after you have wrote the pages content use a free checker to see the “META keyword -to- page content” relevancy. A great way of making sure you are using your keywords well. A good keyword tool is here.

Use header tags for your content

• Search engines scan the pages content for richness, relevancy, keywords and well structured content. Using <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4> tags show the search engine algorithm that that is the title for that bit of content. Use these wisely. <h1> should really be used once for the page’s title. <h2> is more of a section or category header. It is good practice to set you page’s structure under the standard H tag format, and also breaks up the page nicely. You can see on this websites page that you mainly have the <h1> tag displaying the page title and the other tgas breaking up the content.

Internal Links Optimising

• Internal links on your site should not only have anchor text that has the keywords for the page it is linking to but also a “title” attribute that has similar traits. Anchor text is the text within the code of a link. The Anchor text is a short description about where the link is going to.
• The title attribute is what the user sees when they hover their mouse over the link (and is still used by Yahoo, Bing and Ask) and should have a description about the link for the users eyes. Some browsers frequently display the title as a “tool tip” (a short message that appears when the pointing device pauses over an object), and IE7 did this but IE8 does not. Setting the [title] attribute essentially tells users about the nature of the linked resource.
• It is hard to tell how much this is weighted by Google but as good practice it is still good to optimise the title tags on links. Treat links on your internal pages as you would like them to be treated if they were on another site linking to one of your pages.

Image Optimisation

• Your images should have alt text that you can include keywords for the page the images are on (without keyword stuffing). Alt text is short for “Alternative Text” and is displayed when the image cannot be rendered. If images do not have alt text then they are not “accessible” and may not conform to W3C standards.
• Do not have the same keyword for 10 pictures on a page though, as Google is bound to know that you are not being true to the image theme. Also if the image has a link on it then the link needs anchor text just the same as any normal text link. The image link alt tag should include the function of the image link destination (i.e. menu item) but with keywords as well if possible.

3. OFF-SITE SEO TECHNIQUES

Web 2.0 (Social Media)

• Web 2.0, new media, social media. Basically a way for users to interact with a website and other users. Comments, reviews, forums, social networking, articles submission to social networks, etc all fall under this and it is the way the world wide web is heading. For example, on this site you will find articles with comment options at the bottom, blogs, a forum and easy linking to from social networks. See our Social Media Marketing section for more info.

Updated 16-12-2010