One of the hardest parts of optmising your website for the search engines spiders is knowing where to start. You can scroll through your site pages as much as you like, but you know full well the answer won't come jumping out. You can easily get lost in all of the analytics tools and data but still there is no inspiration. Well, fear not, because Indulge Web Design, Guernsey are going to provide you with a check list to start you on the road to SEO success.
Search Engine Optimisation - The Basics Checklist
The web page URL - Web users and search engine robots alike often start their crawl of a website with a glance at the website's URL. URL's are the perfect opportunity to start you SEO work in the right way. Make sure the words in the URL for each of your web pages is meningful and describes what your page does. URLs can often become messed up by content management systems but many of the modern CMS systems include SEO frielndly URL option (Wordpress, Joomla etc), so we suggest you use them. In an ideal world, your URL should work something like this...www.usefulsitename.com/category/type/name - this would make it clear to users and search engines exactly where they are.
Page Titles - Much like their big brothers, URLs, page titles are extremely important to both the website user and the search engine spiders. Make sure every page on your website has a meaningful and useful page title that describes the contents of your page in a sensible and succinct manner, don't be scared to get it wrong, just ask yourself, 'how would I describe in 5 words what this web page is for?'.
Meta Data - Now, we know, search engines don't really care about meta data that much any more, and the average user doesn't really mind either, but that is not to say it is a waste of time. It is rather on the contrary, meta data is just another opportunity to add some keywords to your site. Rule number one is not to stuff this opportunity full of keywords, rather just add a few useful words and phrases that could point somebody in the right direction.
Image Names and ALT Tags - Aha! We caught you out there, didn't we! There was you thinking that SEO was all about keywords on your website, well, it just so happens that images are just as important to the SEO process. In the age of Google, search engines now commonly list image results amongst text results on their search returns. Images a crawled exactly in the same was as the rest of your website. The one thing to bare in mind is that a search engine robot cannot see your picture, so it has to rely on your image name and ALT tag to work out what is in the image. Whenever I am checking images on a site, I like to imagine how I would explain to someone who could not see the image, what it is. Make sure your image filename and ALT tags have menaingful infrormation relating to the theme of your site and you should be onto a winner.
Navigation - Navigation is SUPER important, in short, it is the only way anybody, or anything is going to find their way around your website. Now, although human visitors will be able to read image based navigation buttons, it is important to remember that these hold less balue to the search engine spiders when compared to text based buttons. The best thing to do is to ensure that your website has a clear navigation structure, complete with useful anchor text and logical categorisation and structure. A text navigation system is always a safe bet and I would certainly recommend you optimise your site as such.
Content is Indeed...KING! - Ok, Ok I normally refrain from using such gharish cliches as that but it really is the case. The first rule of website design is clear and simple, there has to be a point to your website. You can make a design look beautiful but if there is nothing to go into the design then your site will fail. There are many types of content you can fill your site with; images, text, video and interactive elements but the key is to make sure it is all relevent to your target audience and that it is presented in the best possible way for the search engine robots to consume. No matter what type of website you run, it is always advisable to start your content with some decent, wholesome text based sections. Text really is food for the searche engine robots and it is a great place to start optimising your site. Make sure that every one of your website pages has at least some text (we suggest 200 words at least), and then make sure it is sprinkled with keywords that are relevent to the subject of your website.
Header in the Right Direction - With every large chunk of text content should come some meaningful header tags. Header tags allow you to show both website visitors and search engine spiders what each part of the text is about and what the leading piece of information should be. header tags should always contain your most useful keywords or information. Top SEO Tips Searhc engine robots only want to find the websites that are best for human users, so always optimise for humans and not robots Search engines love fresh content, so try and update your website content as much as you can, blogs are perfect for this. SEO is all about common sense, there is no hidden secret, just make your website useful and content led, the search spiders will work out the rest It is always worth submitting a sitemap to the search engines - to make a quick sitemap go to an XML Sitemap Generator and then signup to Google Webmaster Tools to submit it to Google. So, that completes our introduction to SEO checklist, there is much more to learn and we will be sure to post the next checklist to look deeper into your website so that you can make the most of your content. Any questions, just ask! Brought to you by Indulge web design and digital marketing Guernsey! If you would like to speak to the Indulge Media Guernsey Search Engine Optimisation team about how we can help you with your seo efforts, then please visit the contact us page.
