SEO Essentials for Website Design
I have written a list of points that will be useful for web designers and developers to help them understand the technical aspects of SEO better. This list intends to give them a brief introduction to SEO.
This list of SEO points will be useful for both agencies and in-house SEO departments where the website developers are a separate department from the online marketing team, and where these developers are not yet fully versed in good practice for designing websites for search engines.
I have often found myself in a position where I have been asked to help SEO a new website built by people who knew it was going to be marketed, but didn’t realise that the way the site is coded affects the site’s potential in the search engines. This often causes unnecessary setbacks as changes must be made due to knowledge not being passed on through different departments.
Hopefully this brief list will go some way to giving technical people who are new to SEO a bit of insider information!
URLs
- URLs with keywords often rank better than those without, therefore it is important that SEO keyword research is done on a site before the site and URL structure has been developed, in order to avoid having to make changes later on
- URLs should appear static and without any dynamic characters such as “?” or “&”, as this is better for search engine spiders to crawl
- If a site is based on a database, URL rewriting (using mod-rewrite) should be used to create static-looking URLs if they are dynamically generated
- Each URL must contain unique content & each page must not be accessible through more than one URL
- If more than one URL points to one page, a 301 redirect, or mod-rewrite rule, should be used to point all other URLs to one chosen URL
- URLs should ideally be kept quite short (less than 255 characters & no more than 4 sub-folders)
- URLs should not use session IDs
- Sub-domains should not be used unless they are intended to be seen as a separate site, if possible use subfolders instead (subfolders get search engine site value passed to them, whereas sub-domains do not)
- If a URL changes, a 301 redirect should be implemented at the same time, and point from the old URL to the new locations – 302 redirects should not be used unless the change is temporary
- All URLs that do not point to an existing page should be directed to a custom 404 page, which returns a 404 status code in the server response header – a custom 404 page should not return a 200 status code
- All URLs containing unique content should be accessible by search engine spiders, and should not be blocked by robots.txt or nofollow tags unless specifically requested
Flash
- Flash files cannot be spidered properly, only basic meta data added to the file is spidered
- If Flash content is needed, build the pages for the site in HTML and use HTML navigation to link to the pages. Embed a separate Flash file into each page
- Keep all text content as HTML text on each page, only use Flash for graphics/animation/video – not text content or navigation
HTML code
- All CSS and JavaScript code must be held in external files, not in the HTML code of each page
- Body content for each page should be as near to the top of the HTML flow as possible
- Do not use tables for site design, use CSS
- All page headings should be contained within <h> tags – the main page heading should be <h1>, and subsequent headings <h2> and maybe <h3>
- <h1> tags should always come before <h2> tags in HTML code flow
Content
- Do not try to hide content from users or search engines – any type of hidden content (text the same colour as page background, tiny font size, hiding text behind images etc.) is seen as spam
- Do not try to serve search engine spiders different content from users – this is seen as cloaking
Navigation
- Do not use Flash, JavaScript or image maps for navigation – use normal HTML and CSS as this is spiderable
- If image maps, or the other types of navigation, must be used, provide a spiderable alternative
- Do not use frames
Links
- Search engine spiders use links and keywords to rank web pages in their search results
- Links with keywords as the anchor text are more valued than “click here” links, as they associate the keywords with the destination page, thus helping the rankings for that keyword
- External links to sites are very important, but it should not be forgotten that internal links (links from one page in a site to another in the same site) are also important
- Building internal links into a site design is an easy way to get a head-start in ranking in search engines
- Each page should have a target keyword/phrase, and lots of other pages in the site should link to that page with that specific keyword/phrase
- Nofollow tags can be added to internal links if they are deemed not important for search engines (e.g. privacy policy, terms & conditions etc.) – this means that PageRank is not wasted on these pages, and instead is spread to other, more important, pages
