TechnoratiThe cat is most definitely out of the bag in regards to SEO. With millions of websites on the Internet, and the pace of new websites growing almost exponentially, it's no secret that strategic SEO planning is critical if you want your site to be found amongst the millions. All one has to do is search "SEO" on Google Trends (one of the many experiments underway at Google Labs) to see a snapshot of the growing interest through the years in this highly sought after expertise.
Google Trends chart of the average worldwide traffic of search term "SEO" in all years. Years shown: 2004—2009. Graph plotted May, 2009.
SEO Tips, Before Content Writing and Development
Any good website checklist review should include what SEO considerations are necessary before the content writing or development phase begins. Of course things like inbound link building to improve your PageRank, PPC campaigns like AdWords to increase traffic, and contextual advertising on networks like Google AdSense to monetize your traffic are important, but lets not put the cart before the horse. Any SEO undertaking should have a holistic approach starting from the ground up.
The following checklist covers some of the most basic and fundamental SEO strategies that should be decided before any development or content writing begins, because incorporating them post-development may be financially prohibitive or structurally impossible. By the way, if you are planning on outsourcing your SEO to another firm, now's the time to get them in the mix not after the site is developed.
- Select Your Keywords
- After selecting a website topic and target audience, keyword generation is probably the most important step of the SEO process. From copy writing to inbound link building, all subsequent work will be centered around these decisions. You can think of keywords as words or phrases that you want your websites pages to rank for when a user enters a search engine query. For example, if you sell bookcases made from oak wood then some of your keywords may be "bookcase", "oak wood bookcases", or "fine oak bookcases". Generate as large a list as possible, and then use tools like to analyse competition and rough search volume estimates to narrow down your choices. After some analysis pick the keywords that you have the best chances of ranking high for.
- Select Your Domain Name
- The first thing a search engine spider will see about your website is the domain name, and so it offers a great opportunity to incorporate keywords from your list. Continuing with the oak bookcase example, an ideal domain name might be something like "oakbookcases.com", or "bookcases.com". Even better, purchase two domain names, one hyphenated as in oak-bookcases.com and one non-hyphenated as before. Park both domain names on the same server, pointing them to the same site, and then register the hyphenated ones with search engines while using the other for marketing. The reason being is that search engines interpret hyphens between words as spaces so each keyword will be individually readable and thus easier for search engines to index. Finally, decide whether you want to include the "WWW" or not before your domain name, and then setup a 301 redirect for all requests with/without the "WWW". This will ensure that your site's rankings aren't competing with eachother between the "WWW" version, and "non–WWW" version.
- Establish File Naming Conventions That Utilize Keywords
- Subsequent to search engine spiders crawling your domain name is the retrieval of the filename used for the current web document. Consequently, this likewise provides an ideal opportunity to incorporate targeted keywords for indexing. Avoid using generic filenames such as page1.html, page2.html etc., and devise a naming convention for developers to follow as they create the website. A possible naming convention would be to have filenames mirror the contents of the <title> tag as closely as possible (which itself should be optimized for keywords) with words separated by hyphens or underscores. Google has supposedly updated their algorithm to recognize underscores as spaces, but other search engines may not, so use hyphens to be safe. For example, an URL for a web page about an oak bookcase with three shelves should look like www.oak-bookcases.com/book-shelves/styles/three-shelves.html, where the filename is "three-shelves.html".
- Develop a Keyword-rich, Logical Directory Structure
- The ideas here are very similar to the ones for the filename conventions since your directory names become part of the URL for a web document within them. Name your directories with keywords in mind where appropriate, and avoid deeply nested structures as this will slow down and potentially prevent the indexing of your content. In addition, if your site employs a logical directory structure you increase the likelihood of having Google Sitelinks displayed under your site when it appears on a Google search results page. Here is an example of sitelinks for the website A List Apart. Using our example URL from above, www.oak-bookcases.com/book-shelves/styles/three-shelves.html, we can see that the website should have a top level directory named "book-shelves" with a subdirectory named "styles" that contains a file named "three-shelves.html".
- Choose an Appropriate DOCTYPE for (X)HTML Validation
- According to the standards put forth by the W3C, each (X)HTML document requires a valid document type declartion, or "DOCTYPE". There are two main reasons for using a DOCTYPE: To ensure the correct browser rendering mode, and to tell an (X)HTML validator what version of (X)HTML to use when checking the documents syntax. For SEO planning we are mainly concerned with the latter reason. If your (X)HTML documents do not validate because they are not well formed, then search engine spiders will have trouble crawling your pages and a substantial portion of your content may not be indexed. When choosing a DOCTYPE consider your audience and what browsers you want to support. If you want to support legacy browsers then perhaps a transitional version DOCTYPE would be better than a strict version. Look over different document type definitions to see which one would best suit your objectives. Most important, remember that what is good for accessibility and web standards is good for SEO, and choosing a DOCTYPE is your first step in standards-based web development.
At Long Last, Coffee & Coding
If you follow this SEO checklist then your site will rest upon a solid foundation that is highly optimized to rank well for your desired keywords. With the SEO preliminaries out of the way you can finally grab your favorite cup of coffee and start coding knowing that your early, strategic SEO planning will prevent any potential post-development nightmares. Going back and renaming files, directories, and the anchors that link to them for an entire site would be a costly and wasteful endeavor that you no longer have to worry about. Bear in mind, however, that there are numerous SEO considerations during the development and post-development phases of any website.
