SEO-it Article: SEO-it.co.uk Top Ten Tips
We like to keep things simple, so here's the SEO-it.co.uk Top Ten Tips that will get you well on your way to achieving a website that's welcoming to customers and search engines alike.
1. Page Titles and Descriptions
Give the different pages on your website a relevant and unique title and description, that describes and matches the content on that page. This way you'll help your customers identify the pages and tabs in their browser and invite the search engines to index your pages individually.
2. Keyword Relevance
Keep your keywords relevant, use ones that describe the product or service on that page and make sure the keywords are proven to be important by using them in your page content, including titles and descriptions.
3. Content Formatting
Make it easy for content readers, crawlers and customers alike by formatting your code professionally. Use CSS to control the appearance of your pages, making sure the source code of the pages themselves contain the raw data the search engines are after.
4. Sitemaps
Add a sitemap to your site, it'll help with accessibility and indexing. Start with a dedicated html page for your website and from here expand into XML sitemaps and beyond. They're not difficult to get and implement, you can your site fully site mapped in less than a day.
5. Standard Compliancy
Conform to standards, prove that you have efficient code, and easily accessible. This will help crawlers look through your code for the good bits and show that you have put a lot of time and care into your site's structure. Start at the W3C Validator.
6. Put Customers First
At the end of the day, it's customers that you want to appreciate your website, find it easy to use and hopefully purchase something from you. Make it all about them while keeping search engines in mind and you'll not go wrong.
7. Branch Out
Got a product or service that could stand out on it's own, then why not make it a branch of your business itself, give it it's own site, dedicate some real time and energy to getting it noticed and reap the benefits of more enquiries and sales.
8. Careful Linking
Stay clear of links pages, they're so 1996, include links in your site, but only if they are relevant, will aid the visitor in finding out more information, don't send them away from your site for no reason at all, It won't do you any favours.
9. Keep Flash for Flashy Bits
Personally we don't care if it's rumoured that search engines can read flash or not, flash websites are not going to be as easy to look at and index as standard HTML ones. Their accessibility is terrible and quite often aren't necessary at all.
Flash is great for adding little extras to your site, animations, promotions and extra bits of information, but for content, it'll cost you a lot, of money and business.
10. Keep On Top Of It
Once you're in a good spot, getting visitors to your website, on the front page of Google for a few good search phrases, don't put your feet up. If you got kicked off the front page by your rival customer, you'd put a little extra effort into your site and get them back, well that's exactly what all of your competitors will be doing to you.
Search engines are always updating their crawling algorithms and your competition will be updating their site's too, these will all effect how you're indexed, so keep on top of it, refresh those sitemaps when you make changes and give your customers something new to look at once and again.
Good Luck!
Team SEO-it.co.uk
