Web Design and Web Development Help

This beginner’s guide to Onsite SEO will focus on optimizing your site for search engines in order to drive traffic to your website. This article will not address external SEO practices. Although some of this content is arguable by many, I feel this is a very good basic foundation.

I find it easiest to start at the top of a website and work down in making sure I have targeted the most important aspects of my website’s construction. As SEO is ever changing, my intent is to update this article as necessary.

So let’s get started on your way to creating a site that has the potential to be a top ranked site!

Domain Name - www…

Short and descriptive is best! Short meaning the fewest possible words. Descriptive meaning to have your most important keywords or keyword phrase in your domain to help improve search engine placement. With the shortage of short descriptive .com’s available a creative solution is to use hyphens. If you do want to use a hyphen, one hyphen is best. If it were available, which it isn’t, an example of a short descriptive domain name for a birdhouse manufacturer would be www.birdhouses.com.

Title

Recommended length is 6 to 12 words or approx 65 characters including spaces. You should spend considerable time planning your site’s page titles because they are CRITICAL for SEO. Not only does the title of a page appear at the top of the browser’s window, it is most often used as the site’s descriptive text on a search engine’s result page (SERP). This is the place to insert keywords and phrases as well as branding/business name. If you are using a click-through-rates program (CTR), writing a compelling title may increase your click success rate. Use the most prominent keywords at the beginning of a title with your business name or location towards the end. There will be more on keyword prominence later in this article.

In the example below, I did a google search for the phrase, “Victorian Birdhouses for Sale”. Take a look at a few of the titles. See if you can figure out which ones would generate the most click-through-rates.

In my opinion, the two with arrows are the first two entries I would click on. They clearly show me a title in which I am specifically searching for. This shows you how important a unique title is for each page of your website as well. Since many of the other results above are just a bunch of keyword phrases tossed in like a stale salad, I would be less likely to click on those.

Meta Tags

The only relevant meta is the description. The description meta serves a few purposes. Firstly, in some search engines it can be found below the clickable title on a search engine results page (SERP). Therefore a well written description will help with click throughs. The description also helps describe the contents of a page to some search engines and also prominently displays targeted keywords to aid searchers in finding content. See example below.

Heading Tags H1

The insertion of a well written html h1 tag will help with SEO. Many experts rank the h1 tag to be one of the most important pieces of onsite SEO. H1’s should have unique content and not be duplicates of the title or meta description. If you are one of the few experts that sees no benefits to the h1, keep in mind it still aids in usability. H2 through H6 tags have less importance for onsite SEO.

Page Links

Including keywords or phrases in your internal links is relevant in SEO. An anchor link such as http://www.birdhouses.com/victorian-birdhouses.html is better than http://www.birdhouses.com/victorian.html. The best link would be http://www.birdhouses.com/victorian+birdhouses.html. Avoid underscores such as http://www.birdhouses.com/victorian_birdhouses.html because at the end of the day, hyphens and plus signs are better.

Links on your site including your navigation should be written in html and styled in css and given descriptive wording. Using images in navigation is a waste of important SEO real estate since most sites have their navigation at the top of the page. A beneficial navigation would look like this

Home | Victorian Birdhouses | Farmhouse Birdhouses | Contemporary Birdhouses
vs.
Home | Victorian | Farmhouse | Contemporary

Pay attention to dynamically produced URL’s. Whenever it is possible create shorter URL’s with keyword phrases using an .htaccess file.

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