Basic Step by Step SEO Guidance

Posted 11 June 2008;

Optimise the Web site

Your web site must be "optimised", meaning designed well using the correct coding standards and structured in a way that makes navigation easy. The site should ideally validate against the W3C Validation Tool

Domain Names

Domain names are highly searchable, therefore choose your domain name with care. We would always suggest however that a domain name should reflect your company name, maybe with the possibility of using one keyword in there somewhere. Keep it brief though, the longer the domain name the more difficult it will be to remember
Also the age of a domain name is relevant, the older the domain name is, the more likely the web site will be of quality use to someone. Probably why people pay money for old domain names (or steal yours if you don't renew it quickly enough!)

Titles of Pages

Every page in your site should have a unique title which is displayed (usually in blue) as text with the search engine results page (SERP)
Avoid stuffing too many keywords in here, it needs to be readable and should entice the user to click it

Description of Pages

Again every page should have a unique description, this is an overview of the page contents, perhaps the first few lines of the first paragraph and usually appears in black beneath the title within the SERP

Headings

Search engine robots look for Headings within the text of each web page, therefore choose these with care, ensure they are relevant to the content

Copy Text

Search engines obviously look for text itself, this is where you need to ensure your keywords, titles, description and headings all match the actual textual content. If not the search engine may blacklist you
You could also use bold or italic text on some keywords within your main copy text, apparently this may indicate importance to the search engines

Alternate Text on Images

Accessibility as an important factor, all images must have alternate text available
This text is used by screen readers (for example JAWS) and also appears if images have been blocked by the browser

Internal Links

When a search engine robot finds your site it will usually retrieve your homepage first
The robot will then try to find all of the links from your homepage to the rest of the site
It is very important to ensure all of your links work, if a robot follows a dead link your page rank may be penalized
Also, robots (at this time) cannot read text on images, so you will need to supply plain text links somewhere if you're using flashy graphics on your menu system
Apparently however some Search Engines are researching ways to read text on images and in animations

META Data

META Data is used within the Head section of each web page
It can contain many pieces of information, including keywords, descriptions and robot instructions
However some META Data can be replaced by instructions within Sitemaps (such as asking a search engine to revisit a site every 7 days) and can therefore be disregarded
Some search engines may only use parts of META Data that others do not (for example Google does not read META Keywords due to old keyword stuffing methods)

Sitemaps

Sitemaps are used to tell search engines what pages exist within a web site
They can also be used to define a priority of web pages and specify how often the search engine should index it
Sitemaps are currently supported in XML (for Google) and Text (for Yahoo) based formats

Page Rank and Relevant Inbound Links

The overall quality of a web site is determined by its Page Rank
The Page Rank algorithm was developed by Google to assign a numerical weighting to a web site which is used to determine how important it is
This will obviously effect how highly you will be listed in the SERP
Page rank can be acquired from relevant inbound links from other web sites
The more inbound links you have, the more important your site is and the higher its page rank could be
Also if the site linking to you has a high page rank, it will also increase your own
You could also contact the webmasters of other web sites directly (again relevant web sites) and ask if they would list you
You must be careful here, old SEO techniques involve blanket submitting your site to hundreds of directories on the internet in an attempt to increase your page rank
However the links must be relative to your site content, only opt to list yourself in directories which are relevant to your site
Also it appears that webpages with just masses of links going to lots of different websites are now being ignored
Other areas to consider would be creating your own Blogs and RSS Feeds, but these must be kept up to date
A particular "spamdexing" technique for link building involved leaving comments on blogs and forums with your contact details including your web site address. This is called "link spamming", avoid this unless it is actually a legitimate comment (for example; "hello, nice weather today isn't it? for further information please contact the webmaster at www.aerovisionit.co.uk" is not really a legitimate comment!)
Articles are a good way to create legitimate inbound links, these can be posted on various websites, but like blogs and RSS feeds, you must keep them up to date

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