Low-hanging fruit: SEO tips

This is the first of several, at least I intend to write several, posts outlining low-hanging fruit for different areas of web development that are commonly ignored and easily implemented for rewarding results. I’ll start with SEO.

Search Engine Optimisation

With the right amount of attention to detail, SEO will encourage your site to be indexed by search engines and presented to search engine users as a relevant, attractive and visible answer to their searches. Above all, SEO is not difficult and the majority of SEO “techniques” are simply good coding practice as shown in the tips below. The tips below are not offered as a definitive guide to everything SEO, more over a few simple yet effective tips on how to propel your site up the search engine results ladder. On with the nerdy stuff!

Meta Keywords

Possibly the most obvious and over documented SEO tip out there but I simply couldn’t leave this out. Creating meta content containing the most frequently used and important words / phrases on the page is crucial for getting your site returned when those keywords are entered in Google or Yahoo by a user. Beyond picking the words and phrases you think should return your site when entered in a search engine, improving your in-page keyword density ensures your page will be ranked highly within search engines for containing content relevant to its keywords. Keyword density is improved by including meta keywords within page headers, titles, links and URLs. If you’ve already created you web page and are struggling for inspiration in selecting your keywords never fear; Keyword Density Analyzer & META Tag Creator is here. This handy tool will analyse your site for you and return an appropriate set of tailored keywords for you to copy and paste in to your HTML. A word of caution; programmatic approximation of keywords is no match for carefully hand picked keywords chosen by people who know the page and it’s target audience – this will always reap superior search engine rewards.

Optimise page titles and site structure

By optimising page titles and site structure you can earn search engine brownie points for keyword relevance as your site grows. By mapping relevant keywords to page titles and file and directory names the keyword density and value of your page will increase. This can be taken a step further by using hierarchical page titles, incorporating a breadcrumb navigation within them. The BBC provide a example of good hierarchical page title use:

BBC SPORT | Football | Premier League | Fixtures

Although the title “Premier League Fixtures” would still make sense out of context, the title above is far superior. The BBC title offers search engines additional keywords relevant to the page. Also consider this implementation as a user experience enhancement as it provides good visualisation of location within the web site.

With or without WWW: the decision is yours

Whether you are “cool” enough (in the nerd world alone) to not use www in your web address, e.g. http://nerding.info, or you are from the old school and can’t live without www, e.g. http://www.nerding.info, you should decide either way. Why? Because search engines may decide http://nerding.info and http://www.nerding.info are two different sites and list them separately or worse still think content on the site is duplicated (at both http://… and http://www…) and rank your site poorly accordingly. Simple decision, almost equally simple solution to ensuring your visitors obey your choice. Enter Mod Rewrite. If you want to force search engines and visitors to use www then try adding the following to your .htaccess…

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Or if you’d prefer to ditch the www try…

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mysite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Become the search engine

Viewing your site with the Delorie Lynx Viewer is a good way to see your site through the eyes of a search engine. The service provided at this site allows web authors to see what their pages will look like when viewed with Lynx, a text-mode web browser – similar to what search engine spiders will see. From here, you should be able to spot any glaring errors or issues that are likely to damage your SEO potential.

Provide a map

XML Sitemaps, not to be confused with site maps, list the pages in your web site tell search engines about how often they are updated and what their priority is within your site. An example sitemap element for 1 page of a web site is shown below:

<url>
  <loc>http://www.mysite.com/index.php</loc>
  <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
  <priority>0.8</priority>
</url>

If you have dynamic content or you are just setting up then sitemaps are a good way to get known by search engines where they may not yet have crawled your site or in the case of dynamic content not be crawling your site regularly enough.

That’s it – now go forth and be searchable!