List of most important tips for optimizing your website for search engines.
Search Engine Optimalisation, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing are names for the same white hat procedure to improve the visibility and reachability of a website or particular webpage. Search engines use spiders or crawlers to check a website's source code on relevant keywords and text. SEO is the art of improving this source code in a way that spiders will find your website suitable for several keywords. Most often they consist of semantic changes in the way a website is build and programmed. Here, we try to enumerate the most important changes you should take into account when making a website, sorted by importance. (Of course they are interpretations, common agreed on by most internet marketers, since the actual algorithms used by search engines are secret.)
- Domain Name: Keywords inside the domain name are some of the most important words to describe what a website is actually about.
- Unique Content: Spiders can easily find out whether you have copied your content from another website or whether it is really written by yourself. Also books and pdf's are someway indexed by search engines and should not be copied just to create content. If you want to quote someone else, always use a link to the source.
- URL: Try to create an url structure that makes sense to visitors. Don't use &newsitem=4 but use /news/new_newsitem . These urls have the advantage of containing relevant keywords but also increase usability and allow visitors to guess webpage urls.
- HTML h1, h2, etc: Use valid HTML (http://validator.w3.org) to make it easier for search engines to spider your website. Try to use tags for what they are intended to do. Use the p-tag for paragraphs. Use the h1 tag to store your most important header titel. Use h2 for slightly less important subtitles, etcetera. Add the alt and title attributes inside the img tag to describe an image. Choose the anchor text of your internal links wisely since a link to /news is better described with an anchor text of News then Item.
- Semantic Field Title: This meta title is shown in the browser's title and often stored as its bookmark title. Add relevant keywords and a short title that describes the current page in detail.
- Semantic Field Description: Often used as the standard text for indexed pages in search engine's search results. Important sentence that describes the current page in detail.
- Semantic Field Keywords: Keywords are used by several search engines to describe the content of a particular page. Use up to 8 different keywords.
- Speed: Websites that load in less than a second are favored over websites that take ten seconds to load. There are several ways to increase the speed of a website.
- Time Online: Search Engines will put more trust in webdomains that have been running for years than those that have been online for less than months. So you have to be patient.
- Flash: Although popular and having some basic features to define what their page is about, flash (.swf files) are still being indexed less easy than standard HTML.
- JavaScript: Inline JavaScript reduces a well structured website and makes your source code ugly and unreadable. Locate all JavaScript in external files (preferably one file)
- CSS: Inline CSS reduces a well structured website and makes your source code ugly and unreadable. Locate all CSS in external files (preferably one file)
- Percentage Content: Try to increase the percentage of relevant content of your webpage. Strip your HTML of unnecessary meta tags, comments, old source code and other material which isn't used any more.
- Duplicate Url: Different urls that contain the same content will spread linkrank and index the same content twice. To search engines it is unclear now which page to show. The htaccess file can easily remove duplicate urls http://www.domainname.com and http://domainname.com .
- Google Sitemap: A way to get your pages indexed quickly is to create a Google sitemap, which is used by Google as a guide to index your pages. It is only a guide for Google and indexing is never guaranteed.
There are several SEO tools and plugins that can help you in creating a website which is search engine friendly.
In general, our advice it to create a website and think what visitors would like to see. Don't try to fool search engines; it's a race you will never win. Try to create a website that is interesting for your visitors, without errors, easy to navigate and clear about its purpose. Everything we can do, which can be considered as fooling crawlers of the actual content of a page, is becoming less and less important.
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