Preparing your Website (for launch)!

Disclaimer: I am effectively a ghost writer adding a bit extra. This article is taken from the various community contributions on TWS forums, in particular this thread A big thanks to all those who contributed, we love you guys and gals, you make TWS what it is!

In The Web Squeeze forums Monie asked:

Ok, I have finished building a website for a client.
I have validated the HTML and CSS as well as the JS.
I have done some simple SEO.

What next?

Hold your horses!

I’m actually going to take a step back and define what Monie meant (or at least my interpretation of what he meant) by “simple SEO” as this is where you begin. Preparing your website for starts with the code, and no, I’m not talking meta tags. Meta tags are no longer the number one way to ensure your sites get ranked, not since Google anyway (though it doesn’t hurt to include them).

Google started a revolution in terms of SEO, in the old days, a search engine would look at your page to see what keywords you want your site to be listed under, and look at the content to compare with how relevant the content is compared to the keywords you defined. Google changed this by introducing PageRank, which didn’t just look at the content on your page, but also the number, relevance and PageRank of the sites linking to yours.

How does my code effect my page rank?

Can you increase the likelyhood of gaining a better PageRank just by editing your code? Yes, it’s no guarantee but it definitely helps. First off, we need to make sure that the search engines can easily read your page and understand how your page is structured:

• Use descriptive titles for each page. A title should make it clear not only what site you are on, but also what page you are on. In SEO terms a good title will help a search engine gauge how relevant a page is for a particular search. Not only that, but it should also make it easier for users to tell what that page contains in the search engine listings. Try to avoid duplicate titles on any one site.
• Use the right tag. Think semantic markup, <p> for paragraphs, <h1> for top level headings, <h2> for lower level headings, <ul> for navigation lists. One of the best ways to do this is turn off your CSS, Images and JavaScript to see if your page still makes sense and functions properly, alternatively, you can use our very own Japhs’ CSSNaked. If your page makes sense with the bells and whistles gone, it makes sense to the search engines too.
• Don’t cheat (you will be caught). Some people hide keywords in the content using various CSS properties, not only is this dishonest it can be detrimental to your SEO efforts, to quote John O’Nolan in his article on Link Building for SEO: The Truth Revealed “The people at Google are not stupid (seriously)”.

The second way to gain links by editing your code is by creating a page which isn’t a pain the ass to it’s visitors to use. To clarify:

• Make your initial page load times fast. Once you have finished coding your site, download a copy of Yahoo! Yslow and see if there are any tweaks you can make to make you page load faster. Also, make sure you are compressing your images in the correct format. Perhaps too conveniently, we have a detailed discussion thread in our forums regarding Optimal Image Size and Compression.
• Make the page you are on feel responsive. This is what AJAX should be used for AJAX should not be used for loading content or anything along those lines, as it is inaccessible and damages SEO efforts. However, it can be used for speeding up the tiny interactions the user makes with the interface. Things like making a comment, rating a video or even logging in to the site asynchronously can help reinforce a users perception of speed and ease of use.
• Cut back on the pagination. I do not want to have to refresh my page several times just to get to what I want. Where you can, provide options for the user to control how many results get shown at one time. If you are on a high traffic website this might not be an option due to bandwidth concerns, consider using a Twitter or deviantArt style asynchronous load, on the condition that the button works normally without JavaScript.
• Provide a good search mechanism. A lot of people (particularly techies) hit the front page and head straight for the search bar. If they can’t find what they want, they will drop you like a bad habit.

Remember this; users have an extremely short attention span. If your site is difficult to use or loads slowly, your users will not want to explore further, making it less likely that they will find your content, and in turn, making it less likely that they will eventually link to that content.

Site Maps and Link Building.

These two are forms of more traditional SEO practice.

Generating or writing a site map is a way of making sure that search engines can definitely find all the pages you want it to find on your site. This is an XML site map we are talking about here not to be confused with a site map for your users to get an overview of your site, which might actually be more usefull. As MikeHopley points out in our discussion, site maps have a limited use in today’s web:

A site map can be useful if your site has orphan pages (pages with no links pointing to them), or uses dynamic pages with lots of parameters after the query string (www.somesite.com/prodcuts.php?pageid=27&color=blue&product=cheesy-whatsits&section=1). In these cases, submitting a site map may help search engines to find your pages.

However, a better solution is simply to avoid making orphan pages, and use Apache’s mod_rewrite to create “pretty” URLs to replace your long query strings.

The other reason to submit a site map is that you may want the enhanced stats. In Google Webmaster Tools. If you submit a site map, GWT will tell you how many pages have been indexed.

Link building means to go out and plant links in various places on the web so that a search engine will see them an go “Wow, that site has lot of links lets rank it highly!”. Sounds reasonable right? Well, no it isn’t, in fact it’s very wrong (I’m going to maintain face here as link building gets on my nerves).

Remember what I said about Google changing the game earlier? How a PageRank is defined by “number, relevance and PageRank of the sites linking to yours” and Johns’ quote, “Google are not stupid (seriously)”? The algorithm is clever enough to know which sites are junk and which are legitimate, if you get links from unrelated junk sites it will hardly effect your rank, a good quality link from a related legitimate site will effect it greatly. Once again, MikeHopley elaborates:

By submitting to a large number of obscure web directories, you may get a large amount of low-quality, inbound links to your site. This will slightly improve your pagerank, and will also bring in a small amount of traffic directly.

But why bother? It’s such a lot of effort, and the reward is pathetic. A single link from a topic-relevant PR 6 website could be worth more than all the others combined.

This kind of link building is soul-destroying work. You have to trawl though endless search-result pages, looking for more web directories. More and more and more and more…

Instead, use your time efficiently. Submit only to web directories with a high pagerank. There aren’t many of these — Dmoz and Yahoo are the obvious ones. Also look out for high-PR subject-specific websites that maintain a list of links. For example, my top referrer (other than Google and direct traffic) is worldbadminton.com. This isn’t technically a web directory, but it’s a popular “portal” for badminton players.

In summary, don’t participate in link building, there is little point. Instead try and build relationships with other site admins who relate to your industry, do them a few favors, participate in online discussions with them or even write an article or two (come on you don’t honestly think people write guest articles just because they love the site they are on ). I guarantee if you put some effort into it (nothing is free in this world) you will reap the benefits later!

I know this has been said a 1000 times before but…

Yup. You guessed it, content is king! I can’t remember where I first heard that, but it the most sage advice I have ever heard regarding modern SEO. In reality, unless your site is purely a showcase of your skills, people don’t care about all the frilly bits. As I said earlier people browsing the web have the attention span of a goldfish. Heck, unless you’re the editor, I’d be willing to bet you’re not even reading this properly, you’re just skimming off the top, aren’t you?

The internet allows us to find information in seconds that previously might have been difficult to find in a matter of hours. People will drop in read through, then get back to whatever they were doing. If your content is not worth remembering then it’s not worth linking to either. Write about something you care about, or, if you’re into the business part and not the product, hire a good copy writer who can pretend they care about it. Another great quote from MikeHopley:

The big “secret” of SEO is that you can’t polish a turd. In other words, in order to rank well for competitive key phrases, the site will need great content.

While this is a great quote I prefer his response after I point out that you can polish a turd.

…anyway, you can see that polishing a turd is hard work (compared to, say, polishing platinum). And when you’re done, all you have is a shiny turd.

So, make sure your content is platinum and the rest of it should be a lot easier plus you will have something you can be proud of!

Check out the forums!

Almost, all of the content on this site is produced by members of this excellent online community, and in particular be sure to check out the thread in the disclaimer at the top, there is just too much to fit it all into this article!