Basic SEO Checklist… Part 1
SEO is not as big a deal as the SEO companies try to make it out to be… It’s basically a few design rules that need to be applied and there is no reason to pay some company hundreds or thousands of pounds/dollars whatever to do it for you. I’ve put together a list of things to do below.
1) Keywords – The words that best describe your business or service.
Hopefully you have your primary keyword/s in your domain name… No? Well it’s not the end of the world as you could use a keyworded sub-folder for a bit of SEO weight. What do I mean? Ok let’s say you’re Stan Biggleypoop, a fly fishing teacher and you can’t get hold of flyfishingteacher.com as your domain name but you can get biggleypoop.com
It’s pretty useless as a domain name from an SEO point of view for fly fishing but hey it’s your name and it’s a start. Going back to what I said about using a sub-folder, you could put all your fly fishing related pages into a folder called >fly-fishing-teacher so you would have biggleypoop.com/fly-fishing-teacher/
Always remember, search engine spiders are text only, they need to be told in words what the page is about, they won’t look at pretty pictures and cute graphics and try to figure out what the page is about. Make it hard for them and they simply won’t index your page properly, they’ll get bored and go elsewhere.
1b) To further increase keywords use aside from them in your text content is to use both the title and alt tags within your images and links. If there’s a photo of you in all your fly fishing gear standing by the river proudly holding a huge trout make sure you give the image an alt tag that includes the words “fly fishing teacher” so don’t just use something like alt=”trout” use wording like alt=”Fly fishing teacher Stan Biggleypoop holding a record trout”. Go one further and make sure the photo file name contains a keyword or two, don’t just call it image1.jpeg
1c) All links within your pages should contain keywords in the link name, anchor text and use title tags with keywords to describe the page they are linking to, eg the Fly Fishing Equipment link pointing to the equipment page should be constructed something like;
<a href=”fly-fishing-equipment.html” title=”Fly Fishing Equipment”>Fly Fishing Equipment</a>
All three elements of the link, the target page, the title and the anchor text all contain keywords and that has to be better than;
<a href=”page2.html” title=”">page 2</a>
2) Page Title
Sat up there at the top of your page html between the <head> </head> tags lies the humble looking title tag. Bless it, it doesn’t look much and people don’t always use it… that’s when you see the legend Untitled Document at the top left of your browser.
<shout>YOU MUST ALWAYS USE IT!!!!!</shout>
The words in the title tag are the words that show as the big blue link in search engine results, is anyone going to click a search result like this?
Untitled Document <– crap! title
Blah blah blah etc etc etc waffle drone rant. <– description see 3 below
www.biggleypoop.com/page2.html <— also crap!
Don’t worry about nobody clicking your link, it will never show up in search high enough for anyone to find it in the first place…
<title>Fly Fishing Equipment</title> it takes but a second of time.
3) Description Meta Tag
This might be a grey area for some folks who think the age of the meta tag is dead. Meta tags maybe don’t carry the weight they did at one time for getting ranked in search results but I still think the description tag has it’s place. I wrote about elsewhere in my post, Description meta tags… should they be ignored?
I would say continue to use the description meta tag in your website, as before give it some keywords, it is after all the text that appears below the big blue link in the search results… Better that it says what you want it to say than let the search engine grab any old random snippet of text .
SEO checklist end of part 1…
There is more that can be done and I’ll continue to add bits and bobs of info here in time but to re-cap those first few points:
- keywords – domain and/or sub-folders
- keywords – image alt and link title tags (including photo & page file names)
- page title – keywords
- description meta tag – keywords
Look at those and you’ll see the common denominator is keywords, we all know about keywords importance but it’s where they get placed that is just as important. Check those ideas first and you’ll make a significant difference to how your site appears to search engines.
Steve Ellis was born at an early age in the UK and then moved to France. Over the years he has done some stuff, some of it to do with web design etc. There is some more stuff about him but it's pretty boring.
