10 Important SEO Factors for Everyone |
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Friday, 17 April 2009 |
 For those new to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and website
development, SEO can appear very challenging. There are many aspects
to an optimized page.
Do not worry. As the concepts become familiar, the process
becomes manageable. You also realize that there is no "magic bullet"
that gets your site to the top. Much of SEO is attention to detail, time, and effort.
Climbing to the top of search engine result pages is a slow steady
process. It takes effort and time, when you are there the view is
worth it.
Here are ten useful elements to Seach Engine Optimzitation, they apply to every website big or small, new or old.
- Meta Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords Every page should
have these. The meta title should be no more than 66
characters including spaces, the meta description should be no more
than 160 characters including spaces, and the keywords should be as
many as appropriate to the page. Maybe it is 1 maybe it is 5. It is
best to keep the keywords to only the important ones, try for no more
than 7.
- Quality Content at least 200 words per page. Should be
relevent, easy to read, and provide value to your visitor. If you
create great content people are more likely to link to you, convert to
customers, and return to your site.
- URL Structure These should be easy to read, minimal "&" and "?", and contain important keywords.
- Internal Link Anchor text Intstead of using "click here" to link
to pages use your key words as the link anchor text. By incorporating keyword
anchor text for your internal links, you provide aditional clues about the
subject of the linked page to the search engines.
- H1, H2, H3 tags These are helpful for SEO but also good web
design. Proper use of Heading tags will help develop a consistent feel to your site and improve usability. Ideally your page title is displayed in <h1> tags.
- Strong Tags or Keyword groupings The search engines can not tell which words are the
keywords. You can help the search engines out by adding <strong>
tags around your desired keywords. If bolding the words is not visually acceptable to your design feel
free to use span tags or any other sort of html to group your keywords.
- Image Alt Tags As the world of search grows so does the search
for good images. Adding alt tags helps the Search engines better
understand what your site images are, includes your images in images
search results, and assist people with screen readers.
- Fast Web Server, Good Uptime Nobody wants to visit a website
that runs slow or is down and neither do search engines. If your
current hosting provider is not up to your standards consider finding a
better one. JoomlaHosting.com is a great resource for hosting
informatio and reviews.
- Light weight pages Creating pages using web optimized
images, minimal javascript and clean html is good for everybody. This
means there is less information to be transfered and processed which
easier for browsers and humans.
- Incoming Links The more the better! (They should be from good
reputable websites) It is best when they occur naturally, a little
help on your part helps also. This is the only "off page" factor on
the list. Incoming links are not in your direct control but they are
important enough to be added to this list.
Hope this list of SEO elements helps. Address these items and you are 90% of the way to a successful website.
What is missing? What else would you add to this list?
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