Tips and Tricks for SEO Best Practices

I've been asked a lot about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), so I wanted to share some of the fundamentals. At a very basic level, SEO is not rocket science. It's not secret. It's not too complicated, either. But you do need to know how search engines work, how spiders crawl websites, and the basic principles for optimizing your website for search engine results.

There are a few basic items to understand. Over and above these, things get more complicated. But don't worry about the more advanced stuff until you have these following basics nailed of SEO best practices.

The most basic guidance I can give people is to be extremely clear what your target audience is for each page of your website. A few years ago, people used to discover websites by "drilling down" from a high-level portal into specific topics and categories. Those days are gone! Instead, people now use Live Search and Google Search to find specific web pages that address their desires. As a result, each page on your website needs to have a clear target audience - and you as the creator of the content, need to know which specific keywords and phrases you want people to discover your page through.

So, the biggest advice is to start your webpage design with clarity on the specific topic and keywords you want to cover. To think of this in another way, what are the Google search terms you'd expect someone to use in order to find the specific webpage you're building? If you can answer that, you're well on your way!

• URL string: this represents the actual URL that users will use to access this page. Although there are a number of URL guidelines, there are two to be particularly aware of: (1) Make the URL as descriptive and short as possible. For example, if you have a news article about the USA Presidential race, and you're reviewing Hillary Clinton, your ideal URL might be http://presidential.reviews.com/Hillary-Clinton. This is definitely better than a URL like http://reviews.com/review.asp?id=12345. (2) Use few or no parameters. In the example of the presidential URL, notice the ?id=12345 part? That's a parameter. The fewer of those, the better. In no case should the URL have more than 3 parameters. You may ask yourself why the URL is important and there are at least two reasons: (1) URLs are often indicated in the search results from various search engines, and if you have keywords in the URL itself, they will often be highlighted; and (2) people who link to your page (bloggers, for example) often use the URL as the actual link description. When they do this, search engines examine the link description to infer context and relevancy of sites. Bottom line? If you can, make your URL "human readable" and understandable. If a human can look only at the URL and know what content he's going to see, you'll gain some bonus points with search engines. You should also choose only letters and numbers in the URL and if you want to separate words, use a dash mark and NOT an underscore. For reference, look at the URL of this webpage you are on.
• Title Tag: the title tag is what Internet Explorer (or Firefox, etc) will display as the title of the page. This should absolutely contain several keywords. Remember - the more you target your page to specific keywords and search terms, the higher your page will return in relevancy.
• H1 Title: the H1 title is often overlooked, and yet is one of the most important elements of a page. The H1 tag is viewed by search engines as one of the key "descriptors" of a page. Think of this tag as the "heading" for the page - H1 literally stands for the 1st Header of the page. As such, you should build an H1 tag to include your keywords - the H1 tag should be similar in concept, but not identical to the Title of the page. Specifically, your H1 tag and Title Tag should be unique.
• Keywords: these are words that you subjectively decide are important. I usually build these by asking myself for the top 10 search terms that I'd hope someone would use to come to my page. Once I have those, these become my keywords. Users don't ever directly "see" your keywords (or key phrases), but they do help search engines to determine relevancy.
• Meta Description: this is your opportunity to provide a couple of sentences describing this webpage. Make sure to include keywords and to keep the description under 200 characters or so.

If you're not an HTML expert, these rules might seem intimidating - title tags, H1 tags, meta descriptions, keywords... help! One of the easiest ways to learn this is to look at a sample page that's well built. I've provided a basic version of this very webpage you're reading (without all the sidebar information, etc). Take a look at the way these rules are implemented in the sample text file and you can mirror the same structure for your own pages. When you click on the link, it will open a new window - once there, View Source to see the raw text file.

So in summary, you should always consider EVERY page on your site as an entry point by users. This means two fundamental things: (1) every page needs the ability to link to the main page / back to a master list of stuff on your site; and (2) each individual page should be optimised for a specific set of keywords and scenarios under which you'd expect users to visit.

The above points are the minimum items to be aware of. Be deliberate in your approach - SEO is not magic but is accomplished through deliberate planning and page building. In reality, there are hundreds of various factors that search engines combine to determine the importance of your site. Each individual SEO "best practice" you implement helps boost the overall relevance of your site. There is not any one specific item that changes things dramatically - but the above list is absolutely critical. Not all sites have control over the URL itself; while not ideal, it's only one factor in the suite of important SEO items.

In addition to the specific items above, Search Engine Optimization has many additional factors. For example, the number of people linking TO your page is important. If you start by nailing these basics above, you will see an enormous improvement (after being "crawled" by search engines) in the number of referrals to your page.

When you think that your webpage is fully optimized and you have all the SEO best practices in place, there are three critical places to do a final check:

• xHTML Compliance Checker: websites can most properly be indexed by search engines if they are valid HTML. Although many spiders are forgiving of small mistakes, why take the risk? Check your webpage using the W3C Markup Validator.
• Keyword and SEO Analyzer: This tool does a quick analysis of your webpage and reports back to you how well you've optimized the page for specific keywords. You can check your keywords and general SEO compliance with the SEO Keyword Analyzer.
• See your site like a search engine does: These services let you view your site as a search engine sees it. It's always good to know exactly what Google or Live Search actually "sees". I use SEO-Browser.com.

Remember that building a search-friendly and optimized webpage is important so that users can find your content. Most web users today simple go to their favorite search engine, type in a few key words or phrases, and go to one of the first results. Through following the best practices outlined on this page, your website will be highly crawlable and discoverable by users. Good luck!

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