SEO Check List
Thursday 01 April 2010, 08:07am
The following should help give you an understanding of SEO and what is involved. Let me know if you have any questions and I will try to help out.
warren@spikeproductions.co.uk Pick relevant keywords Write your copy to include these words Page Title Tags Add an effective description Optimizing URL’s (web address) Domain names Page Content – Headings Images Off The Page SEO – Inbound Links To get good quality inbound links you need to give people a reason to link to you, you achieve this by creating “remarkable” content. There is a catch generally links from sites link Facebook, Blogs and this is the case for most user generated content. Four Factors affecting link value:
You need to work out what people are likely to type into Google to find the product or service you have. Google have a tool to help which can be found by following the link below. It shows you what the most competitive terms are for your site.
https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal
This is essential to get as accurate as possible because your SEO will focus on using these key words.
Write your web copy to include the key words and phrases as often as possible without it sounding ridiculous.
This is the title that shows up at the top of the browser window. By far the most important area of the page that will influence Google. It is worth crafting great titles for the most important pages on your site. Ideally review every page of the site. Don’t just include the company name here if its unlikely that people search for it.
This is similar to the page title. The meta description tag is information about the web page. A summary of what you can expect to see. This doesn’t affect the rankings but it is used within search results, compelling descriptions will mean you are more likely to get clicks through to your site.
Keep them short – 1 – 2 sentences no more than 154 characters, Google cuts them off
Each page should have a unique description
Use key words, Google will highlight these so it increases the chances of visitors clicking through.
When Google looks for web pages it looks at the URL as one of the factors to determine the relevance. Also if someone chooses to link to your site from a blog or a link they usually copy the URL is the key words are in it this becomes key Anchor Text that Google will spot. Anchor text is wording that can be clicked on.
If it is possible to have your keywords in your main domain name you should do it. E.G instead of www.gorgeous-hair.co.uk for hair straighteners what would be better (if available) is www.ceramichairstraighteners.com
This way your key words are part of the URL of every page on your site.
In the same way as headings make it easier for the viewer to quickly see the content of a page its also the same for Google, If the page is well laid out with headings, using key words Google will see it. The search engine looks at the headings to determine what the page is about. It’s important to “tag” words on the pages so they look like headings to the search engine:
Google can’t see images or the text within images. To help important images should include an “alt” attribute. This is special code that allows you to describe the image with text so that Google can see it, this description should contain key words.
All the above SEO elements are very important to get right but they will only take you so far. To make a big impact on SEO the most important factor to focus on is in bound links. This is a link that clicks through to your site. Google places a lot emphasis on the authority of the web page to work out where it ranks. This is worked out by the number of links pointing to your site and the quality of the site they are from.