SEO 101—Ten Basic Steps
By Bill Quinn, Internet Marketing Consultant
All too many website owners have fallen into the old SEO trap of thinking it’s way too complicated for ordinary mortals. The truth is, however, that you can do a great deal of basic Search Engine Optimization on your site without the aid of a specialist. A good deal of SEO involves what you can do off-site (such things as link building, for example), but don’t overlook your onsite opportunities. The best part is, they’re much easier to handle.
Here’s a good place to start: Ten Basic SEO Steps Anyone Can Implement
Make the following changes to your site’s html codes.
Title Tag:
Grab attention with your Page Title—and don’t use just your company name! This is where you describe what your site is all about. You’ve got 65 characters, so use inviting, interest-grabbing headline-type copy. A good “How To…” sentence or a leading question usually works very well. Use upper and lower case. Do not repeat words if possible. Sell the click through!
Head:
This is the most important tag of all, with the leading on-page impact on how your page is ranked. Be sure to choose strong keywords. If at all possible, the Head should be identical to the Title!
Description Meta Tag:
While Google no longer uses meta tags to determine your rankings, other key search engines do. So be sure to add Meta Tags to every page, starting with your Description Tag first. Describe your main services/products like you are writing a very brief, one line ad. Spend some time on this, because it will be seen by the viewer when he does a search. Be sure to include your main keyword phrase, plus a few related words. You’ve got up to 150 characters, so make them count!
Keyword Meta Tag:
Here, put in no more than about 4-6 keywords. Do not use any commas.
Image Tags
Be sure all of your images have an alt tag in which you describe the image. It's a good idea to use keywords or variations of them to describe the image or the relevant content nearby.
Body Content:
Be sure your content—the visible text on the page—is consistent with the title of your page. If not, you’ll be penalized by the search engines. Use your main keyword phrase for this page as a H1 Headline—the robots will be looking for this, so don’t overlook it. Use just one H1 tag per page. In the first line of copy, if not the very first words of the first paragraph, repeat the same keywords used in the Title. Use variations of the main keywords in your subheads, or as bold-faced type within your copy. Do not overload the page with these keywords. Generally, if you have 3-5 repeats, you’ll do fine (assuming all other factors are optimized.)
File Names:
When you name subpages, be descriptive of what will be on those pages, and use the main keywords in your name. For example, if you want to optimize a page for "red one-strap slippers," your page name would be www.mysite.com/red-one-strap-slippers.html. You may or may not want to use the hyphens to separate the words--there's a lot of controversy over whether they're necessary. Google reads the file name just fine with or without the hyphen. However, do NOT separate the words with an underscore.
Robots.Txt File:
Use this file only if you want to limit access to certain pages on your site. For example, you might want to disallow the spiders from crawling your Privacy or Terms & Conditions pages, not because you have anything to hide, but because you want to stop bleeding of page relevancy. (You could also us Do Not Follow tags to accomplish this.) However, be aware that some robots and spiders (and most hackers) pay no attention to either the Robots.txt file or Do Not Follow Tags. Bottom line is to make sure your site is available to robots and spiders as much as possible, while protecting how much page relevancy is passed along to sub pages.
Sitemap:
A legitimately formulated Sitemap is essential for helping the search engines crawl your site. Check out Google Webmaster Tools for their approved Sitemap generator and load the XML file it creates into your root directory. You’ll need a site map no matter how large or small your site is, so don’t overlook this step.
Error Checks:
A vast percentage of sites we analyze have common errors such as broken links, missing pages, etc. You can catch many of these errors while first creating your site (if your software has that function). As soon as you upload your site to your host server, use Google Webmaster Tools to do a site crawl and diagnosis. It will identify any pages on which there are errors. (Here’s hoping it’s not such a vital error that it shows up on all 500 pages of your site!) Every time you add a new page, run the error check one more time.
That's It.
If you’ve checked out all ten of the above and have verified that they are all correctly set up, you’ve got a great start toward getting your site optimized. This is an ever-changing list, and some of these steps may not be the approved norm next month or even next week. Have your SEO specialist check on your pages regularly, and stay abreast with changing policies.
Is that all there is? Not by any means! You have a long ways to go, but the good news is, once you do these ten steps you’re already miles ahead of most other sites out there.
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