As I finish up a couple of new small sites, I’ve noticed that there are certain things I always make sure I do to give my site the best chance as possible to climb up the SERPs. This time around I have paid a lot of attention to optimizing each page for the search engines and I thought a little checklist might be helpful.
- Minimal code — This is the first time I’ve built a site using only CSS and without any HTML tables to keep everything in place. The sites are ultra simple and very light on code which will hopefully allow Google to concentrate on the content.
- One level deep — The entire site is only one level deep meaning that there are no folders besides the main one. This is just based on a hunch but I think that the closer a page is to the main folder, the better it will rank.
- Linking between the pages on the site — You can access each page of the site from a menu that links to them all plus inside the content wherever applicable.
- Keyword phrases as each page’s title — Each page’s title is made up of the keywords I’m targeting.
- Keyword phrases as my H1 titles — Rather than having the site name as my H1 tag across the entire site, I put each page’s title into the H1 tag so it is targeted for each page.
- Having the URL Match the Page’s Title – The URL for each page is exactly the same as the page’s title (and the phrase I’m targeting) with each word separated b ya hyphen. This makes for a somewhat long page name but I think this is hugely important.
- Using meta tags — Who knows if these things do anything but I find that having a list of my keywords in the meta tags helps remind me what sorts of things I should be writing in the content.
- Content — In the past I’ve never really made a huge effort to pack my content with keywords, it sort of just happens although there’s always room for improvement. I’ve made more of an effort on these new sites to get keywords in there , without being too spammy about it though.
- Strong tags – I’m not sure if I’ll do this or not but adding STRONG tags around key terms is meant to help a bit with SEO.
- ALT tag your images – Using the ALT tag to put a short title onto your images will help a bit with SEO and also allow them to be found by Google images searches which could bring in some visitors.
- Name your image files using keywords – Try to cram just a few more keywords into your page by naming your actual image files using keywords.
There are so many elements to SEO, many out of my control, so it makes sense to me to put as much effort as possible into the parts of it that I have control over. Having your site perfectly optimised for SEO isn’t going to get you to the top of Google by itself, but it’s one important piece to the puzzle and deserves a lot of attention when you’re building a site.
Anyone have any other tips that I’ve missed?
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