51 designs LLC :: web design blog

I’ve been getting a lot of clients lately who are small businesses looking to optimize their current website, so that Google (or whoever) will rank them higher.  One of the things I’ve noticed is that there are some basic SEO practices that aren’t being done. So what I’ve been doing, when creating a proposal for the client, is to attach my list of 7 basic, easy to implement, things they should do for their page… even if they don’t use us to do the whole Search Engine Optimization she-bang.

I call these SEO “tricks”, but in reality, they’re just smart ways of designing a page. Plus, any Google search for SEO will bring up many similar lists.  These are just the ones I’ve personally found to be the most effective.  Also, these are just the very basics that EVERY website should have.  True, full-on SEO takes time and effort.

INTRO – It’s All  About the Keywords

First things first… you need to decide the best keywords for your business. What term(s) will people type into Google, looking to find the thing that your business sells.  There are two schools of thought here: “Long tail” and “short tail” keywords. That’s a whole other discussion, but I tend to find that being more specific with your keywords yields better, more reliable results… especially for localized businesses.

For example, if you sell small, yellow widgets in Albany… trying to optimize for just the term “widgets” is going to be an uphill battle. It’s a competitive keyword, and may take months (or years) for your business to establish itself enough to get on the front page of Google.  However, if you optimize for “small yellow widgets Albany”, you’ll fairly easily get on the front page for that, as well as increase your placement for variations like “yellow widgets” or “Albany widgets”.  Plus, when someone types in that specific phrase, you can almost count on making a sell.

For our example, we’ll optimize for “small yellow widgets” and Google’s localization will help with “Albany”. So, now what?

1. Use Your Keywords in Your URL

Check if “smallyellowwidgets.com” is available, or “smallyellowwidgetsalbany.com” or “yellowsmallwidgets.com” or any mixture of those keywords.  You could even use hyphens in the URL like “small-yellow-widgets.com”.   If that’s taken, try the “.net” and “.org” domains… and maybe add a few extra words like “small-yellow-widgets-site.com”.  And feel free to register ALL of them.

Once you have the URL, you do a number of things.  If you don’t have a website, just use that URL for your new site. If you have an existing site, you can either do a redirect of the URL to your site, or better yet, create a landing page that has some info about your business and then links to your main site.

2. Put Keywords in Your Page Title

Frankly, I’m surprised at how many page titles I see that are “Home Page” or just “Home”. At the very least you should have your business name, but then put in your keywords, and any other helpful information.  If your business is “Bob’s Widget Store”, that should be first in your title… then followed by something like ” – for all your small, yellow widget needs in Albany, NY”.  Keep in mind that Google will only display the first 66 characters of your title, so your keywords should be within that range.  Also, it’s okay for the title to be a little longer, but keyword stuffing will end up hurting your ranking.

To change the title, open up your HTML page in a text editor… then look close to the top for the “<title></title>” tag. Type your title in the middle of the tags, and you’re done.

3. Relevant Info In Your META tags

The META tags should be close to the “<title>” and will take the form of “<meta name=’description’ content=’A description’ />” or “<meta name=’keywords’ content=’keyword one, keyword two’ />“.  META tags used to be more important in the pre-Google days, but now most search engines tend to ignore them… especially the ‘keywords’. Some people still spend hours trying to come up with every possible keyword to put in the META Keyword tag, but it’s mostly a waste of time.  However, I’d still suggest having it on the page, and keeping the keywords relevant and concise. You never know when Google will alter the algorithm to give some weight to the keywords tag.

The META Description is another story. While it won’t help with getting a higher ranking, it will show up in your Google listing. Plus, Google will bold all instances of the search term in the description (as well as the URL, Title, and Page Name).  So even if you’re not the first listing for a search term… having a description with the search term in bold will have a better subconscious effect on the searcher.

4. <h1> Tags With Keywords At The Top Of The Page

The “<h1></h1>” tag holds a lot of importance. When the Google-bot comes to your site and sees that tag, it assumes that whatever is in that tag is important.  It’s designed to be a “headline”, with “<h1>” being the most prominent, then “<h2>”, “<h3>”, and so on. For pages I design, I like to use the header text image replacement trick, which essentially moves the text in the “<h1>” tag off the page and replaces it with an image. But if you don’t do that, at least put your main keywords in there.

To do this, find the opening “<body>” tag, and soon after it, type in something like “<h1>Bob’s Small Yellow Widgets</h1>”.  Again, don’t stuff as many keywords as you can in the “<h1>”… Google will be able to tell, and will penalize your site for it.

5. All Images Should Have ALT Text

The image tag will look similar to this – “<img src=’somepic.jpg’ />”. But for the Google-bot, it has no idea what that picture is of, since it only looks at text. To help with that, you need to put the ALT attribute in the tag, so the image tag looks like this – “<img src=’somepic.jpg’ alt=’A Small Yellow Widget’ />”.  Of course, the ALT text should actually describe what’s in the picture, so you shouldn’t put those keywords on a picture of an airplane.  This is also effective for getting your picture to the top if someone happens to do a Google Image search.

A couple of other points on optimizing images.  First, if you have a jpg picture of a small, yellow widget, you should name the file “SmallYellowWidget.jpg”. Second, you should also add the “title” attribute to the image tag, so that in some browsers, if a user put their mouse over the image, that text will pop up.  I personally haven’t seen the “title” attribute have much effect on SEO, but it’s good practice… and you never know when it will be more important.

6. Filenames Should Have Relevant Keywords In Them

If you have a store that sells all sorts of widgets, and you have a single page dedicated to the small, yellow ones… that page (html file) should be named “small-yellow-widgets.html”.  As I mentioned before, if your page name has the search terms in it, Google will bold all the terms.  Putting in the hyphens helps Google know that they are separate words.

Many online stores use product ids for each page, like “index.php?pid=2345″, and this does nothing to help with your SEO. Of course, in that case, it may not be so easy to change how the page names are displayed, and you’ll need to hire a web designer or SEO person to do either a mod_rewrite or some other way to make the names SEO-friendly.

7. Make A SiteMap

At its core, a sitemap is simply a single page that has links to all of the other pages on your site. In it’s easiest form, all you need to do is create a page called sitemap.html, then list all of your pages (using relevant keywords for each page) and make them link that page.  If you want it to be usable by your site’s visitors, it’s best to keep it in the same theme as your site… but for SEO, it can simply be just text.  Then make sure you link to the sitemap somewhere on the front page of your site.  That way, Google-bot can hit that page and easily find/index all of the other pages on your site.

An even more effective way is to create a sitemap XML file. The specification for creating such a file is not for beginners, but there are many sites that will automatically make a sitemap.xml file for you.  This is one I’ve used many times.

In Conclusion

These are seven basic things that I think every website should have, if they want to be ranked better.  It’s by no means an exhaustive list, and as I’ve said, true SEO takes time and effort to yield positive results.  But without at least these seven things, you’re creating a huge obstacle for your SEO effectiveness.