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  • All About SEO


    Posted: Oct 15, 2009 @ 10:08pm

    The hot new catch phrase in the online world is SEO.  I’d like to take a few minutes to describe what it is and, more importantly, how you can improve the SEO for your website.

    First, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which basically boils down to improving the results when someone searches online for keywords that relate to your website (at sites such as Google or Yahoo!).  Let me preface all of this by saying there is no magical way to get to the top of search listings. Expectations need to be realistic from the start - SEO is a gradual process that takes time.  Be patient.

    The idea of SEO revolves around ensuring that the reputation of your site is measured accurately by the major search engines, such as Google. Google determines where a website appears in a search for a specific keyword term by its “PageRank.”

    From freelanceswitch.com:
    “PageRank is a trademarked mathematical algorithm developed by Larry Page, founder of Google. It takes into account the importance of sites that cite your website’s links as well as how many external links from other important sites you reference; combines these measurements with how links are worded as well as where the links occur, and comes up with a numerical ranking of how your site measures up to others within its keyword targets. The other large search engines, such as Yahoo!, Alta Vista, and Lycos use similar algorithms to measure the popularity and importance of a website.”

    I’ll break this post into three lists: stuff that your web designer should be doing to increase your SEO, stuff that you (the site owner) should be doing to improve SEO, and lastly, stuff that you should not do.

    Web Designer

    These are my Top 12 things a web designer can and should do to increase SEO:

    1. Create and submit a Sitemap to Google.
    2. Use descriptive page titles for each page, such as “About Us - mv|creative Web Design”.
    3. Use descriptive links (i.e. use “click here for mv|creative” instead of “click here”)
    4. Use header tags (h1, h2, etc).  Make sure every page has at least one h1 tag.
    5. Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links (if you have to use images for textual content, consider using the “ALT” attribute to include a few words of descriptive text).
    6. Make sure that your ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
    7. Check for broken links and correct HTML.
    8. Submit your site to Google (and other major search engines).
    9. Move your javascript and css to separate files.
    10. Avoid duplicate content.
    11. Use description and keyword Meta tags (this is not nearly as important as it used to be, but still worthwhile).  Keep each to under 200 characters and make each description unique (i.e. “Golf Lessons Philadelphia” is far more beneficial than “Golf Lessons”).
    12. Add robots.txt to your root directory (only if you want to hide specific pages).


    You (Site Owner)

    Even though there are a lot of things the web designer should do (above), the most important things to improve SEO are determined by YOU and they all have to do with CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT:

    1. Create a useful, information-rich site.  Simply put, if you have good content on your website - stuff that people will want to read and link to - then you will see great search results.  Other people viewing and linking to your website is the best and quickest way for your website’s ranking to improve.
    2. Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
    3. Within your page’s content, create relevant links to other important sites.


    Don’t…don’t…STOP IT

    Don’t try any shady stuff.  Old meta tag and title tricks that may have worked way back when no longer work.  In fact if you try to use them today it will backfire and Google will punish you.

    1. Don’t submit your site to link farms
    2. Don’t use hidden text
    3. Avoid “keyword stuffing”
    4. Avoid Flash-only navigation
    5. Avoid frames and nested tables



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