Last weeks blog was a pretty lengthy summary of all the things you should consider when developing/ designing a website. We touched upon how important it is to develop your site with the search engines in mind. Seeing as we specialise in SEO, we fully understand how crucial this element is, and quite frankly, one paragraph of words could not quite cut it. So we’ve decided to write a more technical guide on how to structure your site to make it appeal to the search engines. Sorry to all the web developers reading this, we know it makes your work harder, but it’s worth it!
FYI: If you haven’t read our blog on ‘What to consider when developing your website’, then you should do so before lunging into the below.
On site assessment
As soon as a new client “clicks submit” (excuse the pun), we’re instructed to undertake an onsite assessment. One of our team will have a browse through your site and analyse it using our unique piece of software that cleverly re-enacts what a search engine does when it crawls your site. The essential components we assess are mentioned in this blog post and if we find any errors with the below, we make sure to highlight them in our initial report and ask you to update your site accordingly.Indexable content
First on the list is indexable content. When piecing together your website, it’s important to make sure all the most important parts are written in HTML format. This will allow the spiders/ bots to see and index the content of your website easily. A few tips to consider are:Image Alt tags: Although search engine crawlers are pretty advanced these days, it’s still not possible for them to recognise images. Make sure any image uploaded on your site has an alt attribute in HTML so that the search engines have a written description of it
If you have any video or audio content on your website, provide a transcript for it. You don’t have to mirror the content word for word, but select the key sentences you want to be picked up by the search engines
When a site is flash or uses java plug ins, it’s difficult for the crawlers to find any information that would deem your site relevant enough to rank, so supplement them with text
By using really useful tools such as our SEO analyser, you’ll be able to check what the search engines see.
Site map and crawlable internal links
Assembling an XML sitemap and ensuring the internal links of your site are easily crawlable for the spiders will really help your SEO. An XML sitemap is not to be confused with an HTML site map. The latter is designed for the human and the former plays a significant role in helping the search engines read, crawl and know which pages of your website to index. This doesn’t have to be a list of every page of your website, just include the ones you’d like to appear in search. The links through your site should structure like that of a family tree, and only include the crux of the clan.Keyword usage and targeting
Keyword usage and targeting is still part of the search engines’ ranking algorithms, so it’s key to ensure your keywords are used regularly and implemented strategically. For example, if you want your page to rank in the search results for ‘watch TV abroad’; you want the phrase ‘watch TV abroad’ to be part of the crawlable content of your site. The search engines will measure how, and how often, keywords are used on each page in order to determine the sites relevancy and calculate its rank. It’s not advised to lump all your important keywords in a box at the bottom of your page, as we see so often. They need to be incorporated in the rest of the text informatively. Don’t worry, this is pretty easy; you can place the phrase in the Title tag, in the URL, two or three times in the content and voila, you’re there.Title tag
Title tags are part of the Meta tags that appear at the top of your HTML in the <head> area. The title tag is the most crucial single tag in your page because it tells the search engines and the users what the page is about. It appears in bold when your content is published on the search results page, so it needs to be a concise, explanatory description of the pages content. It should be around 65-75 characters in length with the most important keywords towards the front, in order to entice users to your site. So many times we have seen clients with their title tag for their home page as ‘Home’, which won’t help you grab the attention of potential clients or the search engines.Meta Tags
Meta tags are page data tags that sit between the open and closing head tags in the HTML code of a document, alongside the title tag. These tags aren’t visible to users but are used to tell the browsers, like Google, specific information about the pages on your site. The two crucial types of Meta tags you need to focus on are:Meta Description: These provide a short description of the page’s content. Often the description is used as the snippet of text that appears in the search results. This should be no more than 160 characters, as the browsers may cut short anything longer than this. It gives you the perfect opportunity to advertise what you offer and along with the title tag, can entice a user to select your page.
Meta Robot tags: these can be used to control where the search engines crawl on your site and what they index. For example, inserting ‘noindex’ prevents the page from being indexed. Inserting ‘nofollow’ prevents the spiders from following links from this page. Inserting ‘nosnippet’ prevents a snippet from being shown in the search results. You can find more information online about which tags each search engine follow and create them accordingly. The robot tags make sure only the most fundamental pages and aspects of your site are visible to the engines.
URL structures (address for documents on the web)
Poorly structured URL’s are a common issue for SEO and can negatively impact your ranking if not structured coherently. Search engines look for keywords in URLs to help them determine their rankings, so if your page name matches a keyword/ phrase input by a user, your site will most likely rank higher on the search results. This does not mean you can stuff your URL with as many keywords as possible; it needs to read well and descriptively. This will benefit your SEO and also the user’s experience.Tip: Use a hyphen to separate words, not an underscore.
Duplicate content / Canonical tags
Duplicate content refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. With a number of similar content management systems and template driven sites now available on the Internet, duplicate content is common and a problem for SEO and search engines. This is mainly because the spiders aren’t advanced enough to determine which URL they should index and rank. However, there are a few ways to help the search engines and save yourself! Most commonly used is a 301 redirect, which will forward one URL to another. However, a better and far easier method would be to use a Canonical tag. This can be inserted into the head of the page that contains duplicate content and will point the crawler to the master URL that you want to rank well. By including ‘canonical’ in the URL, it lets them know the page is the copy.We've got you covered!
As part of our quarterly service we offer a compahensive 3 step SEO strategy designed to make sure that your site follows all of the key elements detailed above and more. Plus, as a client we are constantly reasearching the market and adapting our service in order to keep you one step ahead of the competition!Hopefully this blog has provided some interesting information. Although most of the content is more tailored to developers, we like to educate our clients on SEO methods so that you can really make the most out of our service and improve your websites visibility at the same time. Please let us know if you have any questions.
