SEO Template
Domain Name
Your domain name should be about your product, not about you. It should say “www.widgets.whatever”, not “www.the-great-us.whatever”.
Where you make blue widgets and your keyword research has established that people are indeed searching in quantity for the term blue widgets, then your domain name should be “www.blue-widgets.whatever”. Use of the hyphen is deliberate. Engines see hyphens as a separator between words. Don’t forget, the human eye can seewordsjoineduptogether as being words joined up together. An engine can’t do that. We can’t have spaces in domain names though (a technical thing) so the obvious compromise is to separate the words in the domain name by a hyphen. Not by a dot (.) or by an underscore (_), but by a hyphen (-).
File Name
Again, blue-widgets.htm or .html, .php or .asp, (or whatever according to format) for preference.
Title Tag
Your subject or service should be first, your company name second, if at all. Remember, if you’re Joe Blow and you make widgets, the public will be searching for widgets, not Joe Blow. They never heard of you to look for you, right? So the layout is as follows; “Blue Widgets from Joe Blow Services, the Best of the Blue Widget Makers.”
Description Meta Tag
Same rules; product first, your name second. So it’s “Blue Widgets Customised to Your Specification, from Joe Blow, Home of the Quality Widget. Also, it needs to be long enough for Google to be able to fashion a decent-sized snippet from it. If it’s too short, only a few words long, Google will look elsewhere on the page to source its snippet. This means you relinquish some control over what appears there.
Keywords Meta Tag
Blue,Widgets,Quality,Specifications” etc. Whatever you do, don’t be tempted to shovel in every possible related word you can think of, I’ve seen sites that have lines and lines of these, the same ones on every page. A few pertinent ones on every page please, with variations according to the content of the specific page. Separate them either by commas or by spaces, not by both. It used to be said that you only need to include any one keyword once as the engines would parse them into any possible phrases. Lately there are suggestions that Yahoo wants to see comma-separated phrases. perhaps it would be as well to include just that.
Head
Javascripts and CSS styles usually go in here. They need to be externalised into an external file and referenced accordingly. I used not to bother with either a doc type or a charset but I include both religiously now as validation lately receives wider acceptance as important.
Header Tag
There’s several Header Tags, varying from Most Important (H1) to Least Important (H6). Your keyword or key phrase need to be the first words in the first Header Tag, which should be an H1 tag. The tags should be used in order of descending importance, i.e., your first tag should be the H1 tag and each following tag should be in series, use next a single H2 tag or a series of H2 tags. Don’t start with an H3 tag, then use an H1 tag etc. This will just confuse the engines about the relative importance of your site’s content.
First Paragraph
First words in the first paragraph are your key phrase.
Bold
They’re in “bold”. Or “strong”.
Text Content
Sprinkled liberally throughout your page is your key phrase. If it feels right, then it is. If it feels right and it’s only mentioned twice in a 10,000 word document, and it feels right, then it is right. It’s the document that’s wrong. You’ve written a document that, let’s face it, can’t include your key phrase to any great extent because your document isn’t actually about the subject, is it? You may have started out with the right intentions, but you seem to have got lost along the way. I’ve done it - no reason why you shouldn’t either. Perhaps you can take this page, run a keyword analyser over it and find out what it’s actually about then you can use it as a related page in your site. Remember, you’ll always need more content. Home, asleep in bed, you’ll always need more content.
To sum up, if it’s mentioned ten times in a document that’s one thousand words long, and it feels right, then it is.
Graphic Content
Keep your graphic file names brief and inclusive of a keyword. Alt tags for ordinary graphics are lately being considered relevant again for seo purposes so it’s best to include a keyword.
Internal Graphic Links
Remember that in a graphic used as a link the alt text counts for seo purposes just as normal anchor text does in a text link. Alt=”widget site - large blue widget” would be preferable to alt=”here is a picture of me and Sharon at the beach on holiday in Blackpool last year and if you look closely, you can see I’m holding a widget”.
Internal Text Links
Use keywords in the anchor text throughout. Don’t link to “home” link to “blue widgets home”. Who searches for “home”?
Don’t link to “seminars”, link to “blue widget seminars”. Who searches for “seminars”? Include your keywords in your links. Take this important opportunity to remind the engines what your site is about.
Headers/Footers
Notice the layout of the pages here? I use the same sets of links in the header and the footer. This gets them all in twice (at time of writing - the site expands almost daily so I’ll have to re-think soon) and it’s perfectly legitimate.
Tables
If you’re going to use the traditional table layout, remember to build your table so that the actual main content appears to the engines before the list of links to the left does. Search Engines will expect important information to appear first. This won’t be so important if all your links include related keywords as I advise above, but it’s still worth bearing in mind.
