SEO starts with your website dev and design. Building a website that is search engine friendly in the first place is going to help you with your offsite SEO strategies more than you can imagine. Too often a website gets built that is missing so many vital onsite factors that are going to help you as the site owner to rank much better in the search engines. Because of this I have put together a checklist of things that you will want to consider when building your website.

1. Page Titles — each page should have its own unique Title that included your targeted keywords for that page.

2. Meta Description & Keywords — each page should have its own unique Meta Description and Keywords the include your targeted keywords for that page.

3. Use a domain rewrite to make your URLs search engine friendly.

4. Each image used on the site should have an Alt Tag completed.

5. Include an HTML sitemap that is linked to from your footer. Reference each page on your site from it.

6. Create an XML sitemap for submission to Google.

7. Create a site footer with relevant footer navigation.

8. Make sure you are using 301 redirects for all non www. domains that redirect to your www.domain.com.

9. Avoid duplicate content as a whole on your site, but especially don’t forget about it on your blog. Get rid of your archives duplicate content issues.

10. Emphasize your pages targeted keywords in an “H” tag.

11. Avoid “click here” links. Instead link up relevant keywords on that page.

12. Register your domain for 5 years or longer.

13. Remove or fix any and all broken internal and external links.

14. Make sure your robots.txt file is correct. Don’t make the mistake of including a /.

15. Name images on the page after your targeted keywords for that page.

16. Keep your directory structure as simple as possible and as high level as possible. Try to keep as many pages as you can in your root directory.

17. Use hyphens in your URL instead of underscores.

18. Make sure you have good relevant content on each page.

19. Add internal links from different pieces of content on your site.

20. Make sure your source code is valid and fix anything that has errors.

There you have it!

I was meeting with a client the other day and was asked what are the most important things to consider when writing a blog post. There are two ways to look at that depending on whether you are trying to write a great post that is interesting for your reader, or simply righting for the purposes of SEO…huh, you actually do that? Hopefully each post you make meets both criteria; being enjoyable for your reader and also help you or a client with their SEO. At least that is my goal when blogging…I certainly don’t do it just because I love to type. So in answer to that questions, I have posted below.

Top Tips For Blog Posting and Reasons to Back Up Your Blog:

1. Most importantly make sure your post is worth reading. You want you readers to enjoy reading your posts and find them helpful so they’ll return and read you again.

2. Make sure your posts are related to the subject of your website or blog. If you have a website about money management or household budgeting software, then make sure to talk about that subject every now an then in your posts.

3. To make your posts SEO friendly make sure to include your main target keyword for the post in the title if at all possible. The title of your post is the most important piece of data to a crawler and hopefully it will help serve as link bait for other bloggers.

4. Make sure to use that main keyword and few others you are targeting in the content of your post and link those keywords up to another relevant page in your site or to a client’s site.

5. Try to make the post at least 400 words long…engines love content.

6. Try to use some kind of media in your post…either a picture or a video to make it more visually stimulating.

7. Make sure your content is unique, don’t copy it from your site or others.

8. Present solutions to your customers problems to help them love you.

9. Make sure to back up your blog. Not just blowing smoke here. If you have ever lost your blog content, it’s devastating. I’m actually running a full back up right now myself while I’m typing this. You can do it manually or use a company like Bloggled.

10. Last and not least, post regularly…not occasionally like me. Try to post 5 times a week.

There you have it. Hopefully these tips help you improve your blogging and helps your customer enjoy reading you more.

Today I spoke with a friend about search engine friendly URLs and how they are important for SEO in regards to your site indexing and ranking well in the search engines.  Many content management systems and other hosting platforms don’t offer SEF URLs as a standard feature of the system.  It’s very worth your time to find a plug-in or module you can install to help you accomplish this task.  Some will allow you to automate the process of naming your pages and other require a bit more work, but either way it’s one of the first things you’ll want to do to your site if it’s not already set up.   This is the case with many popular content management systems such as Joomla.

Why are SEF URLs important?

Search engines prefer static URLs as compared to dynamic URL’s.  Static URLs are simply easier for engines to crawl and a static URL is completely read by the engine.  A dynamic URL would often appear like something like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?pageid&=123456w&1212121212%search

or

http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?pageid&=123456w&3434343434%search

You get the idea.  When an engine reads that domain they are going to stop at the ? on every page on your site meaning they are reading every page as http://www.yoursite.com/index.php.  That is not a good thing because these URLs appears as duplicate URLs to the engines.  You want the engines to read your URLs as separate pages that are unique.  Engines much rather prefer a static domains structure such as the examples below:

http://www.yoursite.com/about-us.php

or

http://www.yoursite.com/seo-tools-and-resources.php

I hope this helps you better grasp the concept and importance of SEF URLs.

A few days ago I had a so called “consultant” say to me…I’m not really sure what I should tell people when they ask me what kind of info I should be telling my clients to include in their title and meta data. This person has been in this industry for over 5 years now, I was shocked. This probably comes from the fact that this person learned the correct answer to that questions 5 years ago, and hasn’t stayed up to date on it. So, here is my answer…if you have the same questions, I hope this helps.

Title

Your title is the most important element of your page. You must include it and optimize it if you want to have a chance at ranking for the important keywords you are targeting for that given page. Your title should be about 3-5 keywords in length and can be limited to that only as there is no need to waste that valuable space with anything else. If you were targeting the financial budgeting arena on your page here is a sample of what your title might be:

Financial Budgeting Software | Home Budget Software | Home Finance Software | Personal Finance

That would be it. Don’t load it up with anything other than the words you are targeting and be specific.

Meta Description

Your meta description is still important to a point because many engines still use it to serve as your description in their engine. Therefore, you want to fill it out with regards to your targeted keywords for that page. It should be around 25-30 words in length. Another financially related example:

At “domain.com” we believe that home budget software and home finance software is vital to your personal finance success. Use our financial budgeting software to stay on track for retirement.

Meta Keywords

This section is the least important by far of these sections. Some will say, don’t bother filling it out, but I teach that you want to fill it out in the right way or it will hurt you a bit. Limit this section only to the keywords you are targeting for that page and keep it simple. Don’t fall victim to your desire to load this section up. Example for the page we have been using as an example:

financial budgeting software, home budget software, home finance software, personal finance

That is it. Don’t load it up anymore for this given page and you’ve done it right.

Conclusion

I hope this helps provide you with some concrete examples and guides to assist you with writing your page title and meta data.