I have “rescued” several websites for people in the last couple of years. All had fallen foul of a less than savvy/honest web designer… (see: Has a copy of Frontpage 2001, made a site for their uncle and is now a Web Designer.)

When I get a phone call or email about someones website not getting any visitors or them not getting enquiries etc the first thing I ask is;

“Does your site show up in search results?”

To which the answer invariably is,

“Yes! In fact it shows up as number one in Google.”

Impressive, so what’s the problem? If their site is showing up top spot on the worlds number one search engine why aren’t they getting any traffic?..

So my next question is;

“What search terms to you show up top for?”

“Well it’s when we type our website name in… why?”

Deep breath.

Me: “Well the thing is, it’s not very likely that someone who has never heard of you is going to type your domain name into a search engine is it?”

Client: “I suppose not, we do advertise in a magazine so people reading that will see our domain name won’t they? They’ll type it in won’t they?”

Me: “Possibly but most likely they’ll type your url into their browsers address bar and go directly to your site. What is your website about?”

Client: “We have a couple of holiday cottages in Cornwall that we rent out.”

Me: “Ok, so really you want your website to show up in search results if someone types in something like ‘holiday cottages Cornwall‘ or ‘Cornish holiday cottages‘ then.”

Client: “Yes, that would be great, I see what you mean a stranger is more likely to type that in search than our domain name aren’t they?”

Me: “Exactly, by the way what is your domain name?”

Client: “www.freddyandsandras.co.uk”

Me: “… …”

Me: “Well there’s not much we can do about your domain name, it would be better if it contained keywords relevant to your service. Would you consider registering a new domain something like cornwallholidaycottages.com?.. with keywords like that in your domain you’d be off to a much better start.”

Client: “Well we would, I see what you mean about the name but we’re already paying £30 a month for our existing domain name and hosting.”

Me: “Ouch! That’s a little on the high side but we can talk about that later. I’ve just had a quick look at your website and had a look at all the code that is used to make it all work etc and it’s a pretty bleak picture I’m afraid.”

Client: “Oh dear, we thought something must be wrong. What’s the matter with it and what will it cost to fix it?”

Me: “There are a lot of things missing that need to be included in the behind the scenes coding, some photos could be optimized better and your menu navigation needs looking at. Currently it’s just graphic buttons pointing to pages called page1.html and page2.html.

It gets a bit more involved but basically, graphics are invisible to search engines unless they’re given what called an alt tag, a textual description of the image. The alt tag further benefits by using keywords in it. The button on the navigation menu that points to the Rose Cottage page could be given the alt tag “Rose Holiday Cottage, Available For Rent In Cornwall” . then, the actual link to page1.html could be given a title tag again using some keywords to describe the link destination, Rose Cottage.

Text is much better for navigation links all round and page file names would be better called rose-holiday-cottage.html rather than page1.html. If the menu button needs to stay looking like the current graphic it can be made to look like that using a technique called CSS but that’s for another day.

Anyway I’ll put it all together and get in touch with you in the next couple of days with some ideas and suggestions rather than do it now over the phone. I’ll write up everything I can find and email it to you along with a rough idea of how long and what might be involved to fix it. I can also set you up with domain name registration and hosting for a LOT less than £30 a month.”

Client: “Ok, thanks a lot, I don’t think I’m going enjoy reading through it though. Bye for now.”

Me: “Don’t worry, the appraisal will be totally free to you and I’m sure we can come up with a fair way of taking it from there. Bye.”

And that has been kind of the way the chat went each time, a very disappointed person who had paid good money to a … well I won’t say to what. When you hear the figure £1500 mentioned plus £30 a month for hosting and you go to the site and see:

• A bunch of table cells thrown together (default borders always pleasant to see).
• Times New Roman text just resized for headers no H1, H2 etc used,
• No <head> title tag
• No meta description… a what?
• No alt or title tags used.
• Awful file names like page1.html
• Roaming navigation (homepage it’s at the top, page2 at the left, page 3 over at the right and so on) that swaps around the contents or even misses some out on some pages.
• Photos that are over 1MB but just click and dragged to fit the cell or the more advanced ones using width=”300″ to display a 3000 pixel wide image.
• A multitude of dead links, broken image links and having to constantly use the browser back button to navigate back…

Not good, and there are a lot out there – offering special discounts, £500.00 for a website that not worth £5.00

So, if you have a website that you think could do with a bit of a spring clean, drop me an email. I’ll gladly have a look.

<title>www.mywebsite.com</title>

Urghh! How many times have I seen the title tags simply filled in with the website domain name? I suppose it is better than nothing which is also often the case but…

The title is what will show in a search engine result as the large blue link. It is also the text you see in the top left corner of your web browser. If you see Untitled Document there when vieiwing your website it means you haven’t added a title tag – so get one in there, pronto :O)

You don’t have to worry about the words Untitled Document showing up in search results because they won’t… Unless search engines have become very lax these days a site so badly optimized isn’t going to rank very well at all, this is not a good thing.

Your title should include keywords relevant to the pages subject rather than the site name. These will show bold in search results if they’re the keywords the visitor typed in. Let’s say you run a website that advertises rental property in France, it’s called beaupeeps.com and your home page title is:

<title>Beau Peeps</title> or <title>www.beaupeeps.com</title>

Using your business name Beau Peeps as your title tag is pretty meaningless, it doesn’t contain one keyword relevant to the site subject. Someone searching for Beau Peep isn’t likely to be looking for a website about rental property in France, nursery rhymes maybe…

Similarly using  “Homepage” alone in your title is meaningless with regard to your business/website subject so a suggestion would be:

<title>Rental Properties In France</title>

Hey look at that! It actually tells you or more importantly your site visitor and any passing search engine spider what your website is about. See below for a typical Google search result.

Number 1 out of 6,200,000 results for that phrase… That’s what SEO is all about!

There is a limit to the number of characters (around 60) that you can use before the end of the title disappears off the edge of the search results blue link. like so:

This is a very long title tag that will eventually vanish off the edge of th…

Each page of your website should have its own title, try not to duplicate the same title for each page but remember to include keyword/s relevant to that page eg <title>Rental Properties In Brittany, France</title> on a page about property for rent in Brittany etc.

The same rules apply in your use of the meta description tag…

One of my passions if you like is to learn more about how to create websites that conform to a few basic rules that are 90% of the time missed out by simple page builder software and online site builders. Following these simple to implement rules usually ensures, among many other things, stuff like:

1) Showing up in search engine results pages (serps) through SEO – (here are some (not all) hot tips some people charge a lot of money to share!) keyworded image alt and link title tags, h1 & h2 tags at least for content titles and sub-titles, a good <head> title tag, text links not graphical buttons for menus/navigation, placing javascript etc in external files, adding an .xml sitemap and lastly keep using the description meta tag… although now deprecated for search engine ranking description meta does tell the search engine what text to display in the snippet shown below the blue link in the results pages. Reciprocal linking with other similar topic related sites/blogs is also vital.

2) Showing a reasonably similar appearance in the major browsers

3) Web safe colours and fonts – people go to a lot of trouble to design their site using a font they downloaded not realising it will just default to a serif or sans-serif regular font on every browser in the world on computers that don’t have that same font installed.

4) Usability for others, you might instinctively know your way around your site but a first time visitor may well be lost if you don’t follow simple rules or expectations like:

4i) Logo top left or top right (usually top-left) should always be a link back to the homepage.

4ii) Navigation menus should always remain in the same place on a page – if it’s in the left column on the homepage, keep it there on all the other pages – and be one click away from the homepage or top level pages. I hate clicking a link, getting to that page then finding all navigation has moved or vanished totally leaving me the back button on my browser as the only means of getting back… I’ll just go to Google and find a site that works, goodbye potential customer, gone for good!

4iii) Search Feature – if it’s a big site help your users find what they want with a built in search feature. Most people on ye goode olde tinterwebs are looking for something (often while at work or in a hurry), if they can’t find it on your site they will quickly go elsewhere so help them find it! Wave goodbye once again…

5) Images & links should always be given alt and title tags respectively not just for SEO but for text only browsers like Lynx and screen reader software too. Links should also be given a “focus” state similar to a hover state that tells you it’s a link (often an underline that vanishes on hover) when you hover your mouse cursor over it, the focus state is for people navigating via a keyboard and not a mouse and highlights the links when the TAB button is pressed.

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.

You’ve seen the search results, something like this:

Nice Keyword Title (from the <title> tag)
Here’s the keyword text that is taken from the description keyword rich meta tag with more keyword text here from the description keyword rich meta tag.
http://www.mykeywordwebsite.com

You can see how keywords used in the search are highlighted bold in the search results if they’re there in the site title, description and url. All those extra bold keywords within the result naturally draw a persons eye to it. It might not be the top result on page one of Google but it might stand out more than the top result!

My point is the description meta tag is used by the search engine to display the text below the search result link… This means you can control what the search engine result shows the person searching.

If the description meta tag is left blank or removed totally the search engine spider will just grab some random text snippet from the page and display that. You might be lucky and it’ll grab something useful but it might be some crud from your site footer.

In my opinion the description meta tag should still be used to describe the page and include the keywords you want to show up in search results.