SEO for Web Developers

Shameless Self-Promotion
Barry Adams (I’m Dutch, really!)
Search Engine Specialist @ Visual Script
Blogger:
State of Search
Search Engine People
Great Websites Blog
(Searchcowboys)
Interwebz professional since 1999
© Visual Script 2010, all rights reserved

The Issues
URLs
HTML code
HTTP status codes
Content Management Systems

URLs
Parameters are your enemy
One character different = new webpage for a SE
Duplicate content – which page is THE page?
Indexation – where does it end?
Doesn’t make for good bookmarking & link-sharing

URLs
Bad URL: www.domain.com/default.aspx?p=6&l=en&id=98EAB06
Good URL: www.domain.com/category/product/
Static
Keyword-rich
Doesn’t have to end in .html

HTML Code
Good code is clean, tidy, and scannable
If you have to look for where your elements are, it’s too messy
It doesn’t have to be W3C compliant (but it doesn’t hurt to aim for it)
Shorter = better

HTML Code
Use unsorted lists for navigation (plain HTML)
Content high up in the code
H1, H2, H3 tags for headlines
Standard tags for bold and italics
Minimise internal & inline CSS and JS – put it in separate files
Minimise the amount of CSS and JS files (1 each)
Omit what you can – comments, empty tags, useless meta tags, unused CSS, viewstates, etc.

HTTP Status Codes
Know them, understand them, love them
404 = Page doesn’t exist and never has
302 = Page isn’t here right now but will be back, look at this in the mean time
301 = Page isn’t here and won’t ever be here again, but look at this instead
200 = Everything’s A-OK, here you go

404 Not Found
Use it for everything that has never existed
Don’t redirect
Make it a user-friendly error page

302 Temporarily Moved
Not particularly useful
If you want to redirect temporarily, ask yourself why
No SEO benefit whatsoever

301 Permanently Moved
Use for everything that has existed – expired pages, old subdomains, deleted content, etc.
Passes (nearly) all link value to the new destination
Works across domains

No CMS is inherently SEO friendly
Checklist:
URL structure
Customisation
Scalability
Plugins & extensions
sitemap.xml

Is everything editable?
URLs
Title tags
Meta tags
Content (duh)
Alt-text & filenames
Navigation links
Custom HTML

Questions?
?
http://www.visualscript.co.uk
[email_address]
twitter.com/badams

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SEO for Web Developers

by Barry Adams

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