SEO Best Practices for Web Developers

Technical Insight to Search Engine Optimization

IT Industry for 15+ years
BA – Philosophy
MBA/TM – Global e-Commerce
SEO/SEM/SMO Manager
Social Media Hound
Internet Entrepreneur
Website Designer/Developer
Shannon Steffen [email_address] SKSDesigns in/shannonsteffen Facebook.com/SKSDesigns http://www.sksdesigns.com

Search Engine Optimization is a process that makes your website more attractive to the natural listings on a search engine, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo, so that your website can achieve higher ranking or placement.
Crawlers, aka spiders or robots, such as Googlebot, Slurp or MSNbot are computer generated tools that search engines have to grab content from websites and bring them back to the search engine index.
What search engines CAN do:
Read your HTML source code, text and links
Keep their process secret
What search engines CANNOT do:
Can’t read JavaScript, Flash images, AJAX or imbedded text images
Can’t fill in forms or log into online accounts

Sitemap
Every page listed in site map
Add to sitemap in main navigation or footer navigation
Note this is different from Google Sitemap
All links on your site in basic link format
Use link code: <a href=”http://www.website.com/page.html” title=”keyword”>Keyword in Anchor Text</a>
XML Sitemap
Located at root directory
Submitted to Google Webmaster Tools
301 Redirect
Used to condense homepage versions, redirect single page/file, SEF URLs or redirect entire site.
404 Redirect
Capture lost visitors
W3C Compliant
Validate code at http://validator.w3.org/

Page File Size
Max 150 kilobytes
Before CSS, images, other attachments
Number of internal links
Max 150 unique links per page
URL Parameters
Max two parameters
URL Depth
Max four parameters

Title Tag
H1, H2, H3 Tags
Keyword Tag
Description Tag
Image File Name & Alt Tags
Internal Link Tags
External Link Tags
Robots.txt File & Tag
Meta Number Tag
Meta Country Tag

Write tags for every page of your website – specific to that page
Example:
<title>How to write a press release</title>
<meta name="description" content=”Learn how to write a press release by using our press release checklist." />
<meta name="keywords" content=”how to write a press release same press release checklist distributing a release to the media pr publication relations" />
<meta name="rating" content="General" />
<meta name="distribution" content="General" />
<meta name="revisit after" content="7 Days" />
<meta name="Robots" content="index,follow”/>
<meta name="Author" content=”XYZ Marketing Company" />
<meta name="copyright" content="©2010 XYZ Company" />
<meta name="verify-v1" content=”bibdwq87ndnaou9ueqsnkyi" />

Site Audit
Phase 1: Sitemap SEO audit completed
Phase 2: Site navigation audit completed & navigation spider-able
Keywords
Keyword research completed for site by specialist
Keyword Density
Approximately 250 words of text & 10% keyword density on key landing pages

Slow loading site
Site should load in 30 seconds of less
Black listed
Don’t use spamming or black hat tactics such as hidden text
Mirror site
Don’t use mirror – same information as your website
Confused on domains
Use 301 redirects (.htaccess file) to redirect www domains
Dynamic urls
Rewrite structures if urls are too long
JavaScript
Pull JavaScript and CSS files from external source
Google Webmaster Tools
Use this free tool to check if there are any crawl errors on your site

[email_address]
@SKSDesigns on Twitter
in/shannonsteffen on LinkedIn
SKSDesigns.com
Call 414-455-1286

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SEO Best Practices for Web Developers

by Shannon Steffen

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