“Ground-Up” SEO – 10 Top Considerations for Search Engine Friendly Web Builds

Implementing SEO recommendations shouldn’t be an after-thought; it should be at the forefront of every web developer or webmaster’s mind. Here guest author PackNet examines some of the most important SEO considerations to make when developing a new website.

Due to unawareness, ignorance or perhaps just lack of consideration when developing new websites, a lot of companies seem to be missing the fundamental basics in terms of search engine optimisation. Implementing search engine friendly ‘best practice’ guidelines is much easier in the initial stages of a project, and even better if they can be done during the development phase.

Features such as page/URL structure shouldn’t be governed by guess work, but should be the result of an in-depth analysis of the opportunities available within a sector. If all new websites took the ‘right’ approach to ensuring the development was done in a search engine friendly manner, then there would be a lot more higher ranking pages for authoritative websites than there currently are.

Below are 10 top SEO considerations to make when developing a new website.

1.Page Structure/Hierarchy – As mentioned above, the structure of a website should not be guess work. Keyword, competitor and industry research should be carried out at the planning stage to understand how users are searching for the data they require, and whether there are any uniformed approaches that you should be taking. Visualise the page structure on paper and then portray this on to the website from the beginning. Having a well-thought out and logical page hierarchy allows the search engines to crawl your content much more efficiently.

2.URL Structure – As with the page structure, considerations have to be given to the structure of the page URLs within a website. For example, a bad URL structure could be:
www.example.com/page/index.php?2312312312

Whereas a much better URL structure would be:

www.example.com/service-type/service
A logical and hierarchical page URL (reflecting the structure) provides both users and search engines with a clear indication of what the content is about. It is also beneficial to include keywords within the URL structure wherever possible.

3.Content Strategy – If you are rebuilding a website, or building it for the first time, then there is a great opportunity to attract a number of users through targeted content which is centred on key phrases (derived from keyword research). Through a content strategy you can understand which pages would benefit most from quality (and quantity) of written content, and can also give you ideas of how to best-cater for visiting users.

4.Internal Linking – A large challenge in optimising a website can be getting all of the content found – especially within larger websites. Links to a website are essentially like ‘votes’, which help to increase the visibility and authority of a specific page – and internal linking works in a similar way. Through the use of internal linking between pages with specific and relevant anchor text, you can boost search engine visibility for each of the core pages on a website.

5.Sitemaps – Sitemaps on websites are a useful way for both search engines and users to see a complete list of all of the pages on a website, especially if there are a lot of them. An XML sitemap should be created and submitted to Google, Yahoo and Bing Webmaster Tools. The XML sitemap doesn’t necessarily have to be linked to from your actual website (except for the in robots.txt file… which we will cover shortly). Along with an XML sitemap, a HTML (or ‘static’) sitemap should be created and linked to from your website (usually in the website footer). This HTML copy of the website is something that should be styled to fit in with the rest of the website theme, and is a place where users can visit to see a complete list of pages.

To be continued…

Yes, this is the point where we leave you all hanging. Part two in our series of ‘ground-up’ SEO will be available very shortly, including more considerations to make when developing a new website with ‘search engine friendliness’ in mind. In part two, we will be looking deeper into the more specific recommendations for on-page optimisation, to improve search engine rankings and visitor retention.

Author: PackNet – A leading provider of VoIP phone systems and VoIP reseller solutions, and have recently redeveloped their existing website with search engine optimisation fundamentals in mind.

Image: graur razvan ionut / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Guaranteed Search Engine Placement for the UK market can be obtained through a combination of Internet marketing SEO services and careful selection of terms targeting your audience. But a good strategy is necessary. Your target audience will be found with the right keywords when you have the right strategy.

Better Guaranteed Search Engine Placement with the following ideas
1: Identification of Audience
2: Design
3: The Write Stuff
4: The Maintain Game

1: Identification

Identifying the type of people that would invest in your company is the first step in developing a solid strategy for the UK market. To properly select and balance keywords, an SEO specialist must know the target group, and that’s a question for you to answer. By doing so, you will ensure that your pages land in the top 10 search engine positions on phrases that are searched for by those who are interested in what you have to offer. It does no good to bring people to a web site that has nothing to do with their interests.

2: The Design

Design a site to be friendly to the major search engines. Even in the PPC market where it’s not a top priority, it makes a difference. Sites that work well with MSN, Google and Yahoo do much better than those that don’t work with those major search engines. For natural placement, this is vital for success.

3: Right Writing

Now that search engines can handle your site, the people have to be able to read it. It is important to establish a good balance between search engine content and content for your viewers. A good SEO company will be able to assist you in this, along with the technical and tracking services you will require meeting long-term goals.

A web site is built on the written word. Remaining competitive in the UK market requires good language and good keywords in order to attract an audience and a Guaranteed Search Engine Placement

4: Maintenance

The last step is maintaining the site. When changes are made the search engines judge their relation to older content. Your strategy must be followed when new content is added.

By utilizing these four aspects, you can achieve the guaranteed search engine placements you desire in the UK and allow you to use the full power of the natural and PPC market to drive sales.

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Google has provided a unique tool that will let you tweak the search engine ranking positions of sites.

Google’s searchwiki shows up an arrow for promoting your favorite website, a cross for deleting them and a speech bubble for adding your own personal comments. The new scheme which was officially announced at the end of last week is designed to give the global search engine a more personal touch. Google will now let users completely re-shuffle the results in the search engine so their own favorite websites can get top positions and their least favorite websites get deleted all together!

Spokeswoman Marissa Mayer said that while the revisions won’t change the way that Google naturally ranks website they are not ruling out that if it does become really popular then it may change how they shape their search algorithm.

Is this truly the end for SEO?

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3. The Flash approach to SEO?

Recently we have discovered that Flash is becoming just as powerful through search engines as html code. Search engine optimization is the one of the most popular subjects when Flash is current in conversation. Does google index my swf file? There are normally three answers to this recurrent question, ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘maybe’. Each person will give you a different explanation as to why they think that flash content is indexed or why it isn’t. 

However, through our experience working with search engine optimization we have noticed that more and more flash files are becoming more powerful with search engine results. We have run numerous experiments on flash sites and content on the site normally gets cached within Google which is great. Yet there is one area that remains vague for flash and SEO and that is whether Google has the power to index each frame within a swf file. If you know flash then you will know that building a site on the program will require you to use separate frames. On each frame there is content. Does Google have the algorithmic power to index each frame? 

Usually we have noted that Flash sites which are spread across numerous html pages are more powerful because it is not asking Google to explore the depths of the swf file. This is only our opinion of course, what do you think??

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Results of a new poll have suggested that search engine optimization (seo) will take first place in the ever-growing industry of marketing. The survey was conducted among 400 marketers and about a third of the people said that search engine optimization would be their preferred mode of marketing business online. Pay per click advertising was not that far behind as 26% of the people doing the survey voted for it.

The research carried out elaborates on these findings and displays that marketers realize the strength and potential of online Internet optimization. The pure financial potential of business through the internet cannot be measured.

Advertising online has never been so valued and search engine optimization can change a businesses performance. SEO is surely set to be one of the most influential forms of advertising and marketing.

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We’ve listed what we think are the best free tools for optimising your website or web page for modern search engines. Here are our top 10.

Top 10 SEO Tool. 1 IWebTool
iWebTool is a website offering a plethora of useful online tools, including a pagerank checker, backlink checker, search engine position checker and keyword suggestion tool to name but a few. Check them out.

Top 10 SEO Tool.2 CopyScape
CopyScape is a search engine dedicated to locating duplicate content on the web. Want to make sure no-one is stealing your content? Simply enter your website/webpage and it will search the internet and report back if it finds any part of your webpage duplicated on another site. A fantastic tool.

Top 10 SEO Tool.3 Google Analytics
Google Analytics makes it easy to improve your results online. Write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and create higher-converting.

Top 10 SEO Tool.4 Google Rank Checker
This is a great free Google Position Checker tool that will automatically query Google’s search engines. It checks if your URL appears in the first 1000 results for your chosen keywords. If the URL is present, it will output what position it occupies.

Top 10 SEO Tool.5 Meta Tag Analyser
Designed by SeoCentro, this Meta Tag analysis tool helps webmasters analyse their website pages. This search engine optimisation tool analyses not only the Meta Tags but also tries to mimic the same spider technology as the search engines spiders them self! Awesome…

Top 10 SEO Tool.6 Free Keyword Suggestion Tool
This is a great free tool that allows you to take a peak at keywords and phrases that are being search for on the web.

Top 10 SEO Tool.7 SEO Tools – Search Engine Optimisation
This is another great website that offers a plethora of free Search Engine Optimisation tools.

Top 10 SEO Tool.8 SEO Check list
The SEO Check list brought to you by webconfs.com. This one is a must budding SEO beginners. With its unique point scoring check list you will be well on the way to producing a search engine friendly website!

Top 10 SEO Tool.9 SEO Tutorial
Another great guide from webconfs.com. This SEO tutorial will guide you through all the important factors needed to optimise your website for the search engines.

Top 10 SEO Tool.10 Free Google site map generator
phpSitemapNG is a free Google Sitemaps generator written in PHP, but also generates RSS-based, txt-based and HTML-based sitemap files. It will spider your website and also your filesystem (of course, as you prefer). You can download and use it for free, the licence is GPL.

NB: Don’t forget though, if you’re a customer of Pixel Internet, you can use our own free Google Sitemap generator supplied with all Pixel Internet web hosting plans!

If you feel we have left something out, or would like your own SEO web developement tool added to this least, please feel free to leave a message below!

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Everyone wants to achieve good website rankings, but how do you get to the top on the major search engines like Google or Yahoo?

We’ll this really the million dollar question and unfortunately there is no definitive answer, however we have listed what we think, are the top 10 SEO tips that you can implement yourself, which will ultimately help your websites visibility on the search engines.

SEO Tips 1. Develop Your Key Phrases
Begin by researching your key words and phrases. What products or services do you offer? Where are you located? What’s your area of operation? Perhaps most importantly; what would you search for? Try to put yourself in the mind of a potential customer.

SEO Tips 2. Optimise Your Page Title
The page title is one of the most powerful elements of your website that you can easily optimise. Ensure you use your important keywords, this will help search engines better understand the content of the webpage. Keep it short and to the point; some search engines (like Google) will only display as little as 66 characters including white spaces

SEO Tips 3. Optimise your Page Description
Description Meta, likely to be one of the first things (second to the page title) that your potential customers will see. Write a maximum 150 character description employing all your important key phrases. But most of all remember your trying to stand out from the rest, so make it clear, punchy and to the point.

SEO Tips 4. Write interesting, helpful and ‘human’ content
Now that you’ve written your page title and added your description and keyword Metas, it’s time to start the most involved process of all – writing your page content.

Quality page content is really a balance between grammatical license and readability – incorporating your target key phrases for use by search engines while still putting across a coherent message to your human audience.

SEO Tips 5. Remember those Alt and Title Tags

Adding Alt and Title Tags
Don’t ignore your Alt and Title tags, they can play a big part in your site optimisation.

The Alt tag is the text you see when you move your mouse over a picture or graphic. For example, move your mouse over this graphic of the Pixel Internet logo:

The Alt tag is very useful to screen reading software used by the visually impaired.

The Title tag is the text that appears when the mouse is moved over a text link such as this link here.

SEO Tips 6. BLOG!
Blogs can be a fantastic marketing tool below are just a few reasons why;

1. Structured content – Blog software such as WordPress, with category features allows the aggregation of content according to themes. This makes it easier to categorise content. If you can make it easier for search engines to understand your content, you have a much better chance of ranking well on those topics.
2. Crawlable URLs – Most blog software offers uncomplicated URL structure, making it fairly easy for search engine spiders to find and crawl.
3. Internal links – Blogs that post product or service related information can deep link anchor text to product information or purchase pages deep within the web site. This is very beneficial for ranking on long phrases.
4. Inbound links – One of the biggest benefits, blogs link freely to each other – much more than web sites do. Blogs are also a significant source of many posts to social news and social media web sites. Text, audio and video are all easily supported for syndication by blogs. The more media available, the more likely it will attract incoming links. Additionally, there are many widgets and plugins that make it easy to share blog content, which in turn encourages links and traffic.
5. RSS – Links to RSS feed URL’s that use the blog domain name will assist in building link popularity and when RSS content is syndicated or cited by other blogs, any embedded links will also assist in sending traffic.
6. Fresh content – Both readers and search engines reward fresh content with repeat visits. From a search engine perspective, that means your site can be crawled more frequently, allowing your new content to become searchable more quickly. Fresh content is also indicative of a more authoritative web site.
7. Active community – Comments and trackback features in blog software encourage interaction. An active blog community creates the kinds of citations or signals from other sites (annotated and contextually relevant links) that search engines tend to reward in the rankings. Loyal blog readers can boost a site’s visibility through advocacy on other blogs, in forums offline at conferences as well as on their own blogs and within the comments of your blog.

Look here for a great reason to get your WordPress web hosting with Pixel Internet!

SEO Tips 7. Build up your inbound links
The best place to start any linking strategy is with web directories. The two biggest by far are Yahoo! and the Open Directory (used by Google). Being listed in these is an absolute must as they generate huge amounts of traffic.

There are plenty of other directories you should get listed in too. Global, local and industry-specific directories abound on the Internet. To find them run a search for ‘web directory’ on your favourite search engine. The directories that come up highest in the search rankings will probably generate the most traffic. You can also check these directories of directories:

• Open Directory’s directory of web directories
• Search engine colossus
• Best Free Directories
• Internet search engine database
• Business Directory

SEO Tips 8. Build your website using clean accessible HTML
Here 5 great reasons why you should validate your website;

• Troubleshooting unknown problems – Sometimes, you may be encounter a coding or layout problem and have absolutely no idea what’s going or where the problem lies. Even though W3C’s validator uses advanced language, you can get a pretty good idea on where some of your problem areas are.
• Know what your website will look like – With discrepancies between browsers and Internet Explorer slowly losing its stranglehold on browsers, you should place importance on making sure your website looks identical to the way it does in your preferred browser. Of course, there are exceptions such as browser specific bugs. But do your research on those as well.
• Search Engines like properly formatted HTML – If you decide to open up a <p> or <h1> tag and never close it, that may have been a lost opportunity when a Search Engine spiders your website.
• Encourages Usability – For example, W3C doesn’t let a site pass validation unless all the images in the document have an alt attribute. eg. <img src=”my-goldfish.jpg” alt=”A picture of my goldfish” /> This can only help people with screen readers and search engines.
• Helps you understand coding basics – A validator will let you know if you’re using a CSS or HTML attribute that isn’t capable in some browsers. It will make sure that instead of using &, you’re using & instead.

SEO Tips 9. Be patient!
Getting good rankings on a search engine takes time and a lot of hard work, but most of all a bucket load of patience. There’s no quick fix so beware of companies offering such services. SEO and Internet Marketing can also become very addictive, you’ll find yourself checking the SERP’s (search engine results pages) daily, panicking because your have moved down two places…… WELL DON’T, otherwise before you know it all your hair will fall out and your once thriving social life will have all but disappeared.

SEO Tips 10. We said be patient!

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