SEO Best Practices

Search engine optimization, or SEO as it is most commonly referred to by, is by far one of the most important things involved with a web sites design, and more importantly, its content. I have spent some time compiling my research and experience into what best practices should be followed with SEO, as well as several examples of what should and shouldn’t be done.

Page Title

A title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. Ideally, you should create a unique title for each page on your site. Creating keyword/key phrase-rich text for your page title is critically important, because nearly all search engines give the title element’s text a lot of weight. Create each page’s title to reflect the specific content of that page, using key phrases that people might type into search engines to find your web site.

Accurately describe the page’s content

Choose a title that effectively communicates the topic of the page’s content.

• Example: Rare Vintage Stamps
• Avoid: Choosing a title that has no relation to the content on the page
• Never: Use default or vague titles like “Untitled” or “New Page 1″

Create unique title tags for each page

Each of your pages should ideally have a unique title tag, which helps Google know how the page is distinct from the others on your site.

• Example:
  • 1st Page – Rare Vintage Stamps
  • 2nd Page – Misprinted Stamps
• Avoid: Choosing a title that has no relation to the content on the page

Use brief, but descriptive titles

Titles can be both short and informative. If the title is too long, Google will show only a portion of it in the search result.

• Avoid:
  • Using extremely lengthy titles that are unhelpful to users
  • Stuffing unneeded keywords in your title tags

Display page description first then company/site name second

Because search engines only show so many characters in the page title (first 30 characters or so), it is important to let your user know what the page is about more so than your long company/site name. If the company/site name is first and happens to be long, you could be missing out on potential traffic due to your keywords/key phrases not being spidered because they are beyond the threshold of what can be displayed in the search results.

• Example: Rare Vintage Stamps | Leroy’s Stamp Collecting Site
• Never: Leroy’s Stamp Collecting Site | Rare Vintage Stamps

Meta Tags

Description <meta name=”description” />

A page’s “description” meta tag gives search engines a summary of what the page is about. Whereas a page’s title may be a few words or a phrase, a page’s description meta tag might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph. Google’s Content Analysis Section will tell you about any description meta tags that are too short, long, or duplicated too many times.

Accurately summarize the page’s content

Write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your description meta tag as a snippet in a search result. Be sure to include your keywords and key phrases as well.

• Example: Rare vintage stamps from around the United States that date all the way back to the early 1800s.
• Avoid:
  • Writing a description meta tag that has no relation to the content on the page
  • Using generic descriptions like “This is a webpage” or “Page about stamp collecting”
  • Filling the description with only keywords
• Never: Copy and paste the entire content of the document into the description meta tag

Unique descriptions for each page

Having a different description meta tag for each page helps both users and search engines, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple pages on your domain. If your site has thousands or even millions of pages, hand-crafting description meta tags probably isn’t feasible. In this case, you could automatically generate description meta tags based on each page’s content.

• Example:
  • 1st Page – Rare vintage stamps from around the United States that date all the way back to the early 1800s.
  • 2nd Page – Misprinted stamps that were never meant to make it to the general public.
• Avoid: Using a single description meta tag across all of your site’s pages or a large group of pages

Keywords

These are words that describe the content of that page separated by commas. Although it has been speculated that Google and Live don’t use the meta keywords, and Google didn’t provide documentation on best practices for this, Yahoo, Ask, and others do. Using them definitely doesn’t hurt your chances for higher page rankings. Also, it is important to understand that each page’s content will most likely be different from the next and will probably have different keywords that will need to be associated with it.

Accurately summarize the page’s “key” words

Write keywords that are relevant to your site content. Also, use plural versions of your keywords when appropriate, you will get hits from people looking for singular and plural versions of the word.

• Example: “stamps, collecting, rare, vintage”
• Avoid: Using words that don’t appear in the page content at all. If you have the keywords “stamp collecting” in a meta tag but do not have the words in the content of your page, it is very unlikely that those keywords will help the page do well for ranking.

Keyword popularity with search engines

Are targeted keywords popular phrases used in search engines? A simple keyword search in a search engine will tell you how popular they are. You could also dig through your referrer logs or Web analytics data to determine which search engines send your site considerable traffic for which phrases.

Keywords used by competitors

Check your competitors to see what keyword usage they have. Sometimes they have already done the keyword hunt and you can cross-reference your words with theirs.

Key phrases vs. keywords

Single keywords are much more commonly entered by web users, which make them more difficult to target effectively than multi-word key phrases. Unless the single keywords are highly unique, your best results will be achieved using key phrases. Consider using key phrases when applicable.

• Example: Try using key phrases like “vintage stamps” versus “stamps”.
• Avoid: Creating repeated keywords in attempts to make key phrases “new, stamps, vintage, stamps, stamp, collecting” as it will have negative effects in ranking as you duplicated the word “stamp” three times.

Special timing for keywords/key phrases

Depending on your industry, you might consider creating a calendar of keywords and key phrases for future reference. In some industries, the popularity of given keywords can fluctuate throughout the year. Site owners operating in such industries might find it worthwhile to keep a calendar that lists which keywords and key phrases are popular at different times of year.

Use of robot.txt file

A “robots.txt” file tells search engines whether they can access and therefore crawl parts of your site. This file, which must be named “robots.txt”, is placed in the root directory of your site. It’s important to have a robots.txt file present in your root directory because some search spiders will not crawl a site if they don’t find the robots.txt file.

Files and Directories

Be sure to declare which files/directories you don’t want the robots to crawl. Most bots will recognize most commands. Visit Google’s Webmaster tools for declaration lists.

Session IDs

Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.

URL Structuring

Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website can not only help you keep your site better organized, but it could also lead to better crawling of your documents by search engines. Also, it can create easier, “friendlier” URLs for those that want to link to your content.
URLs like these can be confusing and unfriendly. Users would have a hard time reciting the URL from memory or creating a link to it. Also, users may believe that a portion of the URL is unnecessary, especially if the URL shows many unrecognizable parameters. They might leave off a part, breaking the link.

Use words in URLs

URLs with words that are relevant to your site’s content and structure are friendlier for visitors navigating your site. Visitors remember them better and might be more willing to link to them.

• Do use words in your URL structure or pathing:
  • Right: http://www.leroysstampcollecting.com/vintage/rare/mickeymouse.htm
  • Wrong: http://www. leroysstampcollecting.com/folder1/1089257/x1/0000023a.htm
• Avoid:
  • Using lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters and session IDs
  • Choosing generic page names like “page1.html”
  • Using excessive keywords like “stamp-collecting-stamps-collect-stampcollecting.htm”

Dynamic pages

If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.

Simple Directory structure

Use a directory structure that organizes your content well and is easy for visitors to know where they are at on your site. Try using your directory structure to indicate the type of content found at that URL.

• Example: “…/vintage/rare/mickeymouse.html”
• Avoid:
  • Having deep nesting of subdirectories like “…/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/dir6/page.html”
  • Using directory names that have no relation to the content in them

One version of a URL to reach a document

To prevent users from linking to one version of a URL and others linking to a different version (this could split the reputation of that content between the URLs), focus on using and referring to one URL in the structure and internal linking of your pages. If you do find that people are accessing the same content through multiple URLs, setting up a 301 redirect from non-preferred URLs to the dominant URL is a good solution for this.

• Avoid:
  • Hhaving pages from sub domains and the root directory (e.g. “domain.com/ page.htm” and “sub.domain.com/page.htm”) access the same content
  • Using odd capitalization of URLs (many users expect lower-case URLs and remember them better)
• Never: Mix www. and non-www. versions of URLs in your internal linking structure

Site navigation

A sitemap (lower-case) is a simple page on your site that displays the structure of your website, and usually consists of a hierarchical listing of the pages on your site. Visitors may visit this page if they are having problems finding pages on your site. While search engines will also visit this page, getting good crawl coverage of the pages on your site, it’s mainly aimed at human visitors.

An XML Sitemap (upper-case) file, which you can submit through Google’s Webmaster Tools, makes it easier for search engines to discover the pages on your site. Using a Sitemap file is also one way (though not guaranteed) to tell Google which version of a URL you’d prefer as the canonical one (e.g. http://leroysstampcollecting.com / or http://www.leroysstampcollecting.com).

Naturally flowing hierarchy

Make it as easy as possible for users to go from general content to the more specific content they want on your site. Add navigation pages when it makes sense and effectively work these into your internal link structure.

• Avoid:
  • Creating complex navigation links, e.g. linking every page on your site to every other page
  • Going overboard with cutting up your content (it takes twenty clicks to get to deep content)

Text for navigation

Controlling most of the navigation from page to page on your site through text links makes it easier for search engines to crawl and understand your site. Many users also prefer this over other approaches, especially on some devices that might not handle Flash or JavaScript.

• Avoid: Having a navigation based entirely on drop-down menus, images, or animations (many, but not all, search engines can discover such links on a site, but if a user can reach all pages on a site via normal text links, this will improve the accessibility of your site)

Breadcrumb navigation

A breadcrumb is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors to quickly navigate back to a previous section or the root page. Many breadcrumbs have the most general page (usually the root page) as the first, left-most link and list the more specific sections out to the right.

• Example: Leroy’s Stamp Collecting > Articles > Top Ten Rarest Stamps

HTML sitemap and XML Sitemap

A simple sitemap page with links to all of the pages or the most important pages (if you have hundreds or thousands) on your site can be useful. Creating an XML Sitemap file for your site helps ensure that search engines discover the pages on your site.

• Avoid:
  • Letting your HTML sitemap page become out of date with broken links
  • Creating an HTML sitemap that simply lists pages without organizing them, for example by subject

Consider what happens when a user removes part of your URL

Some users might navigate your site in odd ways, and you should anticipate this. For example, instead of using the breadcrumb links on the page, a user might drop off a part of the URL in the hopes of finding more general content. He or she might be visiting http://www.leroysstampcollecting.com/news/2008/upcoming-stamp-collecting-shows.htm, but then enter http://www.leroysstampcollecting.com/news/2008/ into the browser’s address bar, believing that this will show all news from 2008. Is your site prepared to show content in this situation or will it give the user a 404 (”page not found” error)? What about moving up a directory level to http://www.leroysstampcollecting.com/news/?

Have a useful 404

Users will occasionally come to a page that doesn’t exist on your site, either by following a broken link or typing in the wrong URL. Having a custom 404 page that kindly guides users back to a working page on your site can greatly improve a user’s experience. Your 404 page should probably have a link back to your root page and could also provide links to popular or related content on your site. Google provides a 404 widget that you can embed in your 404 page to automatically populate it with many useful features. You can also use Google Webmaster Tools to find the sources of URLs causing “not found” errors.

• Avoid:
  • Allowing your 404 pages to be indexed in search engines (make sure that your web server is configured to give a 404 HTTP status code when non-existent pages are requested)
  • Providing only a vague message like “Not found”, “404″, or no 404 page at all
  • Using a design for your 404 pages that isn’t consistent with the rest of your site

Popup windows

A splash page is a main entry page that displays either a large graphic image or a Flash animation, usually with a link to Enter a web site or Skip Intro (skip the animated introduction page). Splash pages usually redirect to a new web page after the animation has completed. As you might expect, splash pages typically lack keyword- or key phrase-rich content, as they contain little or no visible body text other than Enter or Skip Intro links. Given little or no text content, the search crawlers have nothing to index.

Typically, splash pages use redirects to automatically advance the user to the web site’s actual homepage. Currently, search engines tend not to index web sites that use redirects, and they’ll ban web sites that create artificial redirects in an attempt to achieve higher rankings. So, by using a splash page that contains little or no text content, and uses redirects, you’ll likely have ruined your chances of having your web site indexed – let alone ranked – by search engines.

Headings <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>

Write an outline

Similar to writing an outline for a large paper put some thought into what the main points and sub-points of the content on the page will be and decide where to use heading tags appropriately.

• Avoid:
  • Placing text in heading tags that wouldn’t be helpful in defining the structure of the page
  • Using heading tags where other tags like and may be more appropriate
  • Erratically moving from one heading tag size to another

Use headings sparingly across the page

Use heading tags where it makes sense. Too many heading tags on a page can make it hard for users to scan the content and determine where one topic ends and another begins.

• Avoid:
  • Excessively using heading tags throughout the page
  • Putting all of the page’s text into a heading tag
  • Using heading tags only for styling text and not presenting structure

Content

Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here. Users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other users to it.

Write easy-to-read text

Users enjoy content that is well written and easy to follow.

• Avoid:
  • Writing sloppy text with many spelling and grammatical mistakes
  • Embedding text in images for textual content (users may want to copy and paste the text and search engines can’t read it)

Stay organized around the topic

It’s always beneficial to organize your content so that visitors have a good sense of where one content topic begins and another ends. Breaking your content up into logical chunks or divisions helps users find the content they want faster.

• Avoid: Dumping large amounts of text on varying topics onto a page without paragraph, subheading, or layout separation

Use relevant language

Think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content. Users who know a lot about the topic might use different keywords in their search queries than someone who is new to the topic. For example, a long-time baseball fan might search for NLCS, an acronym for the National League Championship Series, while a new fan might use a more general query like baseball playoffs. Anticipating these differences in search behavior and accounting for them while writing your content (using a good mix of keyword phrases) could produce positive results. Google AdWords provides a handy Keyword Tool that helps you discover new keyword variations and see the approximate search volume for each keyword. Also, Google Webmaster Tools provides you with the top search queries your site appears for and the ones that led the most users to your site.

Create fresh, unique content

New content will not only keep your existing visitor base coming back, but also bring in new visitors. You want the search engines to see your Web presence is growing, not shrinking. Web sites with 100 pages re-launched with 500 pages do better because of the “tail” traffic (those additional 400 pages are getting direct traffic), and the Web site seems to get a bump in “authority” because the entire Web site has grown.

• Avoid:
  • Rehashing (or even copying) existing content that will bring little extra value to users
  • Having duplicate or near-duplicate versions of your content across your site

Offer exclusive content or services

Consider creating a new, useful service that no other site offers. You could also write an original piece of research, break an exciting news story, or leverage your unique user base. Other sites may lack the resources or expertise to do these things.

Create content primarily for your users, not search engines

Designing your site around your visitors’ needs while making sure your site is easily accessible to search engines usually produces positive results.

• Avoid: Having blocks of text like “frequent misspellings used to reach this page” that add little value for users
• Never:
  • Insert numerous unnecessary keywords aimed at search engines but are annoying or nonsensical to users
  • Deceptively hide text from users, but display it to search engines

Write great articles about your area of expertise

By doing this you become a major source of news and information in your area of expertise.

• Avoid: Burdening these articles with sales pitches for your products or services

Develop your content close to the top of the page (output HTML)

Having an <h1> tag close or right next to the <body> tag increases its importance with search engines and therefore weighs that header title heavier. Also, having your content follow closely after that <h1> has the similar effect. It is suggested that developing your pages framework/structure to have its content just following the <body> tag (at the top) followed by lesser important elements will increase the likelihood that the page will rank higher.

Include your keywords/key phrases in your content

Using your keywords/key phrases within your content will show greater importance in spidering.

Anchor Text

Choose descriptive text

The anchor text you use for a link should provide at least a basic idea of what the page linked to is about.

• Example: Top 10 Rarest Stamps
• Avoid:
  • Writing generic anchor text like “page”, “article”, or “click here”
  • Using text that is off-topic or has no relation to the content of the page linked to
  • Using the page’s URL as the anchor text in most cases (although there are certainly legitimate uses of this, such as promoting or referencing a new website’s address)

Write concise text

Aim for short but descriptive text – usually a few words or a short phrase.

• Avoid: Writing long anchor text, such as a lengthy sentence or short paragraph of text

Format links so they’re easy to spot

Make it easy for users to distinguish between regular text and the anchor text of your links. Your content becomes less useful if users miss the links or accidentally click them.

• Avoid: Using CSS or text styling that make links look just like regular text

Anchor text for internal links

You may usually think about linking in terms of pointing to outside websites, but paying more attention to the anchor text used for internal links can help users and search engines navigate your site better.

• Avoid:
  • Using excessively keyword-filled or lengthy anchor text just for search engines
  • Creating unnecessary links that don’t help with the user’s navigation of the site

Write an anchor title

Having the link’s text be the text within the anchor’s title attribute will help increase usability and also affect page crawling.

• Example: <a href=”http://www.leroysstampcollecting.com/collecting/kids” title=”kids stamp collecting”>kids stamp collecting</a>

Image Optimization <img>

All images can have a distinct filename and “alt” attribute, both of which you should take advantage of. The “alt” attribute allows you to specify alternative text for the image if it cannot be displayed for some reason. Why use this attribute? If a user is viewing your site on a browser that doesn’t support images, or is using alternative technologies, such as a screen reader, the contents of the alt attribute provide information about the picture.

Use brief, but descriptive filenames and alt text

Like many of the other parts of the page targeted for optimization, filenames and alt text (for ASCII languages) are best when they’re short, but descriptive. Use dashes in naming conventions versus underscores (this-image.jpg vs. this_image.jpg). Also use relevant keywords/key phrases in your alt text.

• Example:mickeymouse-stamp.jpg
• Avoid:
  • Using generic filenames like “image1.jpg”, “pic.gif”, “1.jpg” when possible (some sites with thousands of images might consider automating the naming of images)
  • Writing extremely lengthy filenames
• Never: Stuff keywords into alt text or copy and paste entire sentences

Supply alt text when using images as links

If you do decide to use an image as a link, filling out its alt text helps search engines understand more about the page you’re linking to. Imagine that you’re writing anchor text for a text link.

• Avoid: Using only image links for your site’s navigation
• Never: Writing excessively long alt text that would be considered spam

Store images in their own directory

Consider consolidating your images into a single directory (e.g. leroysstampcollecting.com/images/). This simplifies the path to your images.

• Do Not: Have image files spread out in numerous directories and subdirectories across your domain

Use commonly supported file types

Most browsers support JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP image formats. It’s also a good idea to have the extension of your filename match with the file type.

When your site is ready

Submit your site to search engines

Google: http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Sitemap

Submit a Sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your Web pages.

Examine your site

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing your entire site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

Browser compatibility

Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.

Validation

Validate your page/site (Ctrl+Shift+a in Firefox). Validation errors will sometimes stop the spider from crawling your site fully and efficiently.

Webmaster tools

• see which parts of a site Googlebot had problems crawling
• upload an XML Sitemap file
• remove URLs already crawled by Googlebot
• specify the preferred domain
• identify issues with title and description meta tags
• understand the top searches used to reach a site
• get a glimpse at how Googlebot sees pages
• remove unwanted site links that Google may use in results
• receive notification of quality guideline violations and file for a site reconsideration

This article was written on my experiences and research over the years and was written to elaborate on Google’s SEO Best Practices.