Little SEO guide

October 18th, 2007

There are many sites SEO based, who explain how to optimize your site in order to achieve a good search engine results page (SERP) position. Though, I have seen many sites that don’t follow at least the basic rules. So I decide to make this little SEO guide to help those who are starting to make a website.

1. Use Meta Tags wisely

Meta tags are a very important part of your site. They are read by the search engines and contain a summary of what the web page content. The most important Meta tags are: title, description and keywords.
Let’s see how Meta tags should look:

Because search engines read from left to right, it’s important to place the relevant keywords at the beginning of your title, description and keywords.
Title tag is often used as the page title and link text in search engine results page (SERP). Title length should be between 50-80 characters (5-10 words). Title tag must be unique for every page on your site.
Description Meta tag is a concise description of your site. Description tag length should be between 100-200 characters (10-20 words). Description tag must be unique for every page on your site.
Keywords Meta tag should be between 5-10 words. They should be listed with commas and should correspond to the major search phrases you are targeting. Every word in this tag should appear somewhere in the body and no single word should appear more than twice. Keywords must be unique for every page on your site.

You can analyze your Meta tags with this tool: Meta Tag Analyzer.

2. Allow search engine robots to index your site

You can do this in two ways:
I - By using Robots Meta tag:

This tag helps you to specify the way your website will be crawled by the search engine. There are 4 options:

Index, Follow - The search engine robots will start crawling your website from the index page and will continue to the rest of the pages. This is the default behavior: you don’t have to include this tag.

Index, NoFollow - The search engine robots will start crawling your website from the index page and will NOT continue to the rest of the pages.

NoIndex, Follow - The search engine robots will skip the index page, but will crawl the rest of the pages.

NoIndex, NoFollow - None of your pages will be crawled by the robot and your website will not be indexed by the search engines.

II - By using robots.txt
You must have a file called robots.txt which contains some line like:

This means that search engine robots will index all your pages. If you don’t want some folders or some pages to be indexed, you can list them under the Disallow item, like this:

You can find here more about using robots.txt.

3. Use ALT and TITLE attributes

While ALT attribute is used to describe a few elements, like image, area, input and applet, the TITLE attribute can be used to describe almost any HTML element. Both of them will increase your site’s usability and your page’s keyword density score and relevancy for your targeted keywords.

You can analyze your keywords density with this tool.

ALT (alternative) text displays before the image is loaded, i.e., in the major browsers and instead of the image in text-based browsers like Lynx. ALT is a required element for images and area and optional for input and applet. Use ALT to give a proper description of an image. Though, you can use alt=”" for images that are not relevant, like a bullet, for example.
TITLE attributes offers advisory information about the element for which it is set. Many search engine ranking algorithms read the text in TITLE attributes as regular page content.

4. Use headings

Headings are used to provide hierarchical information about your web page. There are 6 levels of headings: h1 is most important heading and h6 is the least important. Use heading tags only for headings. Don’t use them just to make something bold. Of course, you can change the headings style to suit your site design. You can see an example on how it looks:

5. Formatting keywords

It’s a good thing to formatting keywords in your content body, not only for your visitors, but also for search engines. Most of the webmasters use bold <b> or italics <i> tags to strength the keywords. These are formatting tags. But you can obtain the same visual effects using structural tags, like <strong> and <em> , which is better seen by search engines, who consider that these keywords are relevant indeed.

6. Reduce your code as much as possible

You can do this by putting all (or at least the most) your css code in an external file and by putting all (or at least the most) your scripts code in an external file. You can call external file in your head section, like this:

You can reduce your code also by using a tableless design.
Why is this so important for SEO? Well, if you have more content than code on your page, search engines consider that page more relevant. You can find your code to content ratio with this tool.
A higher code to text ratio gives you a better chance of getting a good page ranking for your page.

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Entry Filed under: SEO