Web, Design, SEO and other Hobbies

Let’s continue with Part 3 of basic SEO. In previous posts, I have talked about the top of your HTML page and Google site maps. In this post, I will offer six quick tips on general web development to assist your SEO goals.

1. Always use the standard HTML tags for headings, bold text and lists.

The HTML has tags for headings, bold text and and ordered/unordered lists and you should always use them. By using CSS, you can practically style them anyway you like. By using a H1 heading tag for your headings, strong tags for important text and ul, ol and li tags to create lists will help search engines understand what text on that page is a heading or what are the more important terms on that page.

Using our lawn mowing example from the previous post, here is an example of NOT making a heading in a good way for SEO:

<p style='font-size:16pt; font-weight:bold'>Garden Maintainence Services</p>

By applying a CSS style to a paragraph tag that makes text larger and bold doesn’t tell search engines it is a heading, but rather, it will treat it as though it is a paragraph of normal text because it is a paragraph tag. A much better way would be to define a style for your heading tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6) in your CSS file. The better way to make a heading is this:

<h1>Garden Maintainence Services</h1>

2. Always use ALT text when adding an image.

As search engines can’t read text inside an image, by adding ALT text to your image tag helps the engines understand more about that image. You can use it to place more keywords and phrases into your page but don’t keyword stuff the ALT tags as this is frowned upon and can get you blacklisted.

Here is an example of using ALT text inside an image:

<img src='/images/gardens.gif' width=400 height=300 alt='Garden Maintainence Services'>

3. Avoid Canonical URL issues and never place session IDs on the URL.

Search engines see http://thelawnman.com.au, http://www.thelawnman.com.au, and http://www.thelawnman.com.au/index.html as three different pages. To correct this, you should always link to the preferred domain and at the root level ie. http://www.thelawnman.com.au/. You may also wish to use a redirect to point all of your pages to this preferred option. If you have signed up at Google and are using Google Sitemaps and the Webmaster Tools, you can also select your preferred domain that Google uses. We love Google! How good is that.

If you are using sessions, make sure your Session ID (especially if you have a PHP site) is not added as a parameter PHPSESSID to the end a URL on your PHP page eg. PHPSESSID=34467908. This can be extremely problematic for your site’s search engine ranking. Search engines will see a unique PHPSESSID in the URL every time they visit a page on your site, and in turn think it is a different page each time and even worse, it could be viewed as lots of duplicate content and your site may become banned. Turn off this setting in your PHP.ini file or ask your server administrator to do this for you.

4. Have a unique, meaningful TITLE tag on each and every page.

Unfortunately, this is an area HUGELY NEGLECTED by many web developers. By not having a meaningful title tag, you are reducing the amount of traffic to your site greatly. Each and every page has different text, content and images so why would it not also have a different title? Why use a title of “untitled-1″ when you can put meaningful words about your page in the title. It is also a bad idea to use one generic title across all of the pages on your site.

So, using our dummy site map from the first SEO article, here are three titles for those three pages on our site:

http://www.thelawnman.com.au/

<title>Lawn Mowing, Tree Lopping and Garden Maintainence Services in Sydney :: thelawnman.com.au</title>

http://www.thelawnman.com.au/work-request.html

<title>Work Request for Lawn Mowing and Garden Maintainence Services in Sydney :: thelawnman.com.au</title>

http://www.thelawnman.com.au/current-work.html

<title>Current Work Schedule of The Lawn Man's Garden Maintainence Services in Sydney :: thelawnman.com.au</title>

5. Do not use “click here” or “read more” text links unless absolutely necessary.

Unfortunately, this is also an area HUGELY NEGLECTED by many web developers. By not using meaningful text inside links, search engines cannot establish whether the link actually links correctly to the same subject as mentioned the link text.

An example of this is to search for “click here” inside Google. You will find the top result is actually for Adobe Acrobat Reader. This is because millions of pages use something similar to this:

To install the latest version of Acrobat Reader <a href="www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html ">click here</a>.

So, it is important to have meaningful text inside your links as well. Let’s say we wanted to link from the homepage of our lawnman site to the work request page. The best way in which to do this would be:

If you would like The Lawn Man to work for you, please fill out the <a href="http://www.thelawnman.com.au/work-request.html">Work Request for Lawn Mowing and Garden Maintainence Services</a>.

The link text contains many of the same keywords in the TITLE tag and META data used of the work request page, so the search engines can determine that the link pointing to that page is one they can trust.

6. Where possible, use the W3 Validators on your site.

Your site does not need to be technically perfectly to rank high in the search engines but having a validated HTML page will help ensure that search engines (and browsers) will accurately see your page. Try using the official W3C Validator. Validating generally identifies areas of your HTML code that is redundant, unnecessary, or not accepted across all browsers. All of which will help make your site more search engine friendly.

SEO SEO, Web Development