Since the beginning of working on web development and design, I have been enthralled into SEO (Seach Engine Optimization) and its importance in helping me market myself and the websites that I maintain and create. I wanted to quickly talk about some of the techniques that I use when creating and developing a new site. I have proof that these techniques work as well as a resource that will back up my arguments. A couple of months ago I finished the redesign of the company website at which I work, DataPath, Inc. Before I applied the redesign, I tracked the words “Data Path” and found out what the page ranking was for the three major search engines, which are Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search (now Bing). The ranking was not that high and it was usually on the second page or near the bottom of the first. After applying the redesign and waiting a couple of months for the bots to read the new content and structure, the ranking had jumped up to be the within the top 5 searches on all three search engines, and came to be third on Google.

First, I make sure all the pages of the website are validated. Which means all the html, css, and javascript code is correct and in valid markup, and you do this so that bots that search engines send out to read your site can easily extract and classify what’s relevant on your page. If your web pages can’t be read by the search engine bots then how will the search engines know your relevance.  To validate your site, you go to The W3C Markup Validation Service and input your website’s urls in the search field, hit “Check”, and then fix the errors and warnings on that web page.

Secondly, I make sure that all the link tags in your website aren’t “‘Click here’ to read more.” Links hold a lot of weight when bots read your site. The text of the link is what is important, so I make sure that it is relevant to what you are wanting to see. For example, look at the links on this post.

Thirdly, I make sure that the title tags are different on every page and rellevant to what is on each page. Also, make sure to add the description meta tag within the head tag, which is what is displayed under the title on the search engines results page.

Also, I create a sitemap.xml file and robots.txt file on the website. These give the bots a easier way to see the structure of your site, including the robots.txt file which blocks the bots from crawling certain parts of your site that you don’t want indexed.

There are some cheap and easy ways to get your sites’ page ranking to increase but they do not last and it can cause search engines to penalize your site. So be  weary of easy quick fixes such as adding duplicate content.  Also, other things that might hurt your page ranking are broken links and images, and not putting alt and title attributes with your image and alt tags. But usually the W3C Validator page will let you know about these problems. You can check for broken links and image links by going to The W3C Link Checker. And make sure your css  is validated too, by going to The W3C CSS Validation Service.

Some other techniques I use to help SEO is to have logical or friendly url names for your pages. If you have a bunch of products with a page for each one, have those pages under the folder products, it’s as simple as that and remember that any page on your website shouldn’t be more than three clicks from the root page. Also, if your site is large enough, its good to use breadcrumb navigation for user friendliness.

Finally, when I finish the website I implement Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools into it. Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website’s traffic and marketing effectiveness, which basically means that it is a very comprehensive stat tool for the traffic on your website. Google Webmaster Tools shows you how Google crawls and indexes your website to help diagnose any problems.

These are just some of the things I do to increase SEO and it really seems to help. All these points are backed by an article titled 20 SEO Tips That Ever Web Developer Should Know. Sometime later I will talk about user friendliness and the importance of it.

Cya

Tags: Development, SEO

This entry was posted on Friday, August 14th, 2009 at 1:55 PM and is filed under Useful Websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.