In part three of our SEO for Beginners Guide, we’ll talk about the construction on your site. Spiders and Bots don’t like sites that are not optimized for users. To see if your site passes the test, you can take this simple quiz.
10 Questions for Site Optimization
- Does your site have any broken links? It’s been said that search engines degrade site rankings if there are broken links. Get rid of any broken links.
- Have you validated your HTML & CSS? Your code should meet minimum requirements of functionality and properly display to be spidered and cached be the engines. Guidelines have been laid out by WC3 and they provide a number of great validation tools.
- Do you have web pages greater than 150K? Search engines generally do not cache pages greater than 150K. In addition, smaller file size also mean faster download speed and happier users.
- Do you have Javascript & CSS in your header? To improve their speed and efficiency search engines program their spiders to give up easily if they have problems with a page or if they have to wade through too much code to find the relevant content. This also pushes your keywords down the page. Move JavaScript and CSS out of the header and into external files.
- Are your keywords in your title tags? Keywords should be in your page title and in the first paragraph of your web page. Key words in title tags helps rankings and drives click-through-rates from the search results page.
- Are you making the most of your meta description tag? Although search engines don’t use met tags, including the meta keywords tag, in their page rankings, the meta description tag still plays an important role. Several search engines use this tag as the site’s description displayed just below the clickable title link. Although meta description tag may have little of no impact on the page rank, it can impact the number of visitors th page receives if it’s well written.
- Are your keywords in your content? Make the primary terms and phrases prominent in the document but don’t stuff it. Also, be sure to keep text flow together rather than break it up with coding by using tables instead of CSS.
- Have you checked your writing quality? Great writing helps rankings as well as makes happy visitors. Make sure the content is quality because search engines use sophisticated lexical analysis to help find quality writing. Copyblogger has great articles about how to use a journalistic format to improve your copy.
- Have you created a sitemap? Create a sitemap page and have it link from all major pages on your site. The sitemap should list links to all pages 2 clicks from the homepage.
- Are you using human friendly URL’s? The URL should be descriptive and brief as possible as well as include keywords if possible. URL’s shouldn’t contain more than 2 dynamic parameters.
What Next?
Next: How to Make Your Site Standout (coming soon)
Lesson One: Search Engine 101 and How they Work
Lesson Two: Six Steps to Effective Keyword Search
Back to SEO for Beginners.
Tags: 10 Questions for Site Optimization, SEO Guide for Beginners
