Post 7 on SEO considerations when building a website from concept to completion.
All of the posts to date have looked at how to research, plan, build and design your new website. This week were going to look at how to make your new website as SEO friendly as possible. You’ll need one finished website, source code open and ready to edit.
As you digest more and more information about SEO & web marketing, you’ll come across two phrases that consistently come up. Thesedays, off-page SEO is rightly considered the most important factor for influencing high search engine rankings. Off page SEO is a vast span of techniques and opinions geared around link building, sourcing and optimising – much of which we’ll go into across many posts in the coming months.
On page SEO is what we’ll deal with here today. On Page SEO used to be the be and end all of web marketing, whilst that’s no longer true, good On Page SEO will still have a positive impact on your web rankings. Here’s how it should be done:
There are six factors to be aware of, listed here in order of importance:
1. Title Tags
2. Sitemaps
3. URL String
4. Website Copy
5. Meta Keyword & Description Tags
6. Image ALT Tags
Title Tags
When you view your website in a browser, the words that appear in the very top left of your browser window (as you look at the screen) make up your ‘title tag.’ Your title tag is also what SE’s list in their results and also what browsers click on to visit your website. I believe that your title tag is THE most important on page SEO factor. When writing title tags, your page keyword target should be as close to the start of your title as possible. Keep your title short and snappy. When viewing your webpage source code, your title tag (opens with<title>) should be ideally directly underneath the <head> tag of your page.
Sitemaps
Whilst browsers opften appreciate a sitemap, search engines always love them. Sitemaps make it very easy for SE spiders to crawl through and find all of the pages you have online. I create sitemaps in four formats, html, ror, txt and most importantly xml. The latter is the form of sitemap that Google prefers. Some web marketeers use their xml sitemaps to quickly make Google aware of their new website by submitting it to Google’s Webmaster Tools. I prefer to let Google ‘stumble’ across a new website and find an xml sitemap already there – more on this technique next week. Ideally, your nwe website should auot-generate your sitemaps for you. If not, you can use online resources like this one to quickly generate an xml sitemap for your new site.
URL Strings
If you have been reading all of our posts to date, you’ll know that each of your webpages should have one overall keyword target and that this should be reflected within your webpage url. Click here to re-visit our page planning post.
Website Copy
With your keyword list to hand, read through your new website copy page by page, referring to your individual page keyword targets. There are three steps to making your copy SEO friendly. Firstly, wherever possible every webpage should ideally open with a title to your copy that has your page target keyword within it. For clarification, title here refers to the title above your text NOT your title tag discussed above. Secondly, every webpage should have it’s keyword target written into the first and last sentence of your page copy – again, wherever possible. Last but not least, try to place the keyword target of another webpage within your current page copy and link this to that second page. Try to create keyword targeted cross page links across your site.
Meta Description & Keyword Tags
After your title tag, there are two other meta tags that you should also ensure form part of every webpage. Ideally, both your meta description and keyword tags should ideally include your page target keyword. As your meta keyword tag is simply a comma separated list of keywords, this will be easily included here. Your meta description tag however should be written from the point of view of the browser. This is the text that browsers will read straight from a search engine result page, and hence should focus on enticing the browser to ‘click through.’
Image Alt Tags
Primarily, image alt tags are there to assist browsers who cannot view images to better understand the content of your webpages. Alt tags should therefore be descriptive. However, there is no doubt that they also present another opportunity for you to embed your target keywords within your webpage. Place your p[age target keyword somewhere within the alt tags of the first three images on your webpage.
If you’ve managed to worth through the above steps then your just about jet set to start marketing your new site! Upload your edited and optimised pages and read through each one a couple more times, checking for any missed spelling or grammar errors. In the next post, we’ll start looking at how to get your new website noticed.
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