10 Basic SEO Tips Every Web Developer Should Follow
Posted by JP on January 26th, 2010 in Blogging | 38 Comments
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important ingredients for getting large amounts of traffic to your website besides high-quality content. Because once your articles are a few weeks old, the majority of the traffic to those articles will come from search engines. That's why it's important to rank high in search engines.
In this article I'm going to show you 10 basic SEO tips that you should keep in mind when writing a new article or developing a new website to make sure your blog ranks high in the search engines.
1. Place Your Keywords In the Title Tag
The title tag is one of the most important things for ranking high for particular keywords. That's why it's very important to think of a title that contains important keywords and grabs the attention of people. Because when people search on search engines like Google, the title of your page will be displayed in the results and people will click on links that are the most attractive to them first. Remember that it's also very important and rewarding to have a unique title, so before you use the title, Google it and see if the title already appears in the top 10 results.
Please keep in mind that Google only displays the first 70 characters(about 8 words) of your page's title. Google does not even index the keywords in your page's title after the 12th or so word. Yahoo and MSN don't even index pages that have a page title that's too long. Source: Google – How Many Words In A Page Title Tag?
Note: WordPress users should use the All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress. This plugin gives you the ability to easily place the title of your post in the beginning of your <title> tag.
2. Optimize Your Robots.txt
Having an optimized robots.txt is important because this file can control which pages of your websites get crawled by the search engine spiders. For those of you who use WordPress, I recommend preventing search engine spiders from crawling wp-admin and plugin folders.
Take a look at my my Robots.txt to get an idea of how it works. Its code is pretty much self explanatory but if you want a better understand of it take a look a the links mentioned below.
Here are some more resources about the robots.txt file:
3. Proper Use of the ALT Attribute
The <alt> attribute should be used to describe an image, not to spammed with keywords that have nothing to do with the image.
Why? Because while it's true that search engine spiders cannot read images, they can however read the <alt> attribute, and having it spammed with keywords that are totally irrelevant to the image will make Google aware of what to derank you for.
Here's some more information about the alt attribute:
4. Anchor Text of Links
The anchor text is the text inside your <a> tags that links to other pages. Wether they're incoming or outgoing links, it's important for the anchor text to contain a description of where the link is taking the visitor. This is even more important for search engines because it tells its crawlers where the link is going.
So avoid using words like "Click Here" as an anchor text as it can hurt both your website and the website you're linking to. One more thing to keep in mind is to keep the characters in your anchor text under 55.
5. Quality of Inbound and Outbound Links
While most web developers know that having many web sites link to your can boost your rankings, a lot of them don't know that the quality of the websites linking to your websites plays a vital role in your website's page rank. Getting links for random dofollow blogs has a way smaller impact than if a website with a high pagerank links to your website in an article.
Who you link to matters, as Google warned webmasters that they can be penalized if they link to spam websites. Linking to really bad websites (malware injecting websites etc.) can easily get your site removed from Google's search engine results pages(SERPs). One thing to keep in mind is that Google's spiders might not follow all of your links if you have over 100 unique outbound links on a single page.
More articles about linking:
6. Proper Use of Header Tags
<h1>, <h2> tags etc. should be used when appropriate. Don't be using <h2> tags as a paragraph or using <div> class="title"</div> to display the title of your page or something.
Here's a few things to keep in mind when using header tags:
- only use one <h1> tag per page
- you can use as many <h2> - <h6> tags as you like in your pages
- search engine crawlers only read basic html
More articles about header tags:
- How To Use Tags – Proper Use Of H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6 Elements
- How to optimize keywords in header tags.
7. Importance of the First Paragraph
Your first paragraph is the most important paragraph in your page. This is because it's the first paragraph search engines scan and they assume that it's somewhat of a summary of the page/article. That's why it's essential to have the most important keywords of your page in the first sentence or two.
If you're using the All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress, the plugin will automatically take the content from your first paragraph and place it in the meta description, which is the text that search engines display under the title of your page.
8. Ensure Your Site is Accessible
An accessible website should ensure that its content can be successfully delivered as often as possible. The functionality of pages, the uptime of the server, validity of HTML elements are all parts of site accessibility. If these points are either ignored or faulty, both your visitors and search engines will select other websites to visit.
Use tools like:
To know if your site contains broken links or when your site is down.
9. Use SEO Friendly URLs
The URL of a page should be descriptive so both the users and search engines have an idea what the page they're being linked to consists of. SEO Friendly URLs also have the benefit of serving as their own anchor text when copy pasted to forums etc. due to URL having the keywords of the page in its URL. These type of URLs usually rank higher in search engines than pages with a URL like example.com/p=981489894.
Furthermore, when using Dynamic URLs try to keep your dynamic parameters under 2 or else the chance is high than it might not get crawled by search engine spiders unless they're perceived as very important(ie. have a large amount of inbound links).
More articles about SEO Friendly URLs:
10. Site Usability
If your website is cluttered with ads and has a terrible layout, accessibility, navigation and low quality of content, chances are that you'll get less people linking back to your site than one that has better usability than yours, thus resulting in lower page ranking.
If your website was designed in the 90s you seriously need consider hiring a web designer to redesign your website.
Take a look at the following example which I took from SeoMOZ.org.
These examples clearly show the impact a decent design has on the way users perceive the website. Users are more likely to buy from Haworth's Furniture because the site just gives a more trustworthy vibe than Workplace Office's website. Furthermore, people are more likely to tell a friend about Haworth's website because it just has better usability and seems more trustworthy than Workplace Office's website.
While a nice design doesn't have a direct impact on the rankings of a page, it will indirectly influence it due to users linking back to the site, trusting it etc.
More SEO Resources:
- SEOmoz's Beginner's Guide for SEO
- Google SEO - Search Engine Optimisation Basics
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) by Google
Jan 26, 2010 at 10:56 pm
Ahem…
Jan 27, 2010 at 11:10 am
This is great tips, I must try it…Thanks for share :)
Jan 27, 2010 at 7:16 pm
Great article…always looking for other ways of SEOin’ my sites
Jan 27, 2010 at 10:09 pm
nice…
Jan 27, 2010 at 10:19 pm
Glad you guys like the post
Jan 27, 2010 at 10:21 pm
Don’t forget about site speed!
Jan 27, 2010 at 10:30 pm
yea you’re right. I thought I had mentioned it in site accessibility or site usability
Jan 28, 2010 at 3:41 am
There is no such thing as an “alt tag”!
Jan 28, 2010 at 6:03 am
mkorsakov,
author meant tag attribute, surely
JP,
thanks
Jan 28, 2010 at 6:29 am
thanks for this – it’s a really useful checklist which I’ll definitely keep to hand whilst building sites!
Jan 28, 2010 at 11:26 am
This is one of the few non-preachy and actually useful write ups about SEO I’ve read. Whether you know the information already or not, it was delivered very well. Thanks
Jan 28, 2010 at 12:28 pm
Hello there,
Many thanks to this useful tute…
Also I seem to like ur zen styled no frills webdesign…
Jan 28, 2010 at 1:03 pm
Thanks for the article, I’ve been looking to learn more about this for my Web sites.
Jan 28, 2010 at 1:36 pm
@mkorsakov: lol thanks for pointing that out, I fixed it to alt attribute.
Thanks for all the feedback guys :)
Jan 28, 2010 at 3:27 pm
Thanks for simple and useful reading.
Jan 28, 2010 at 5:32 pm
Very helpful info. Thanks much!
Jan 28, 2010 at 5:37 pm
Great tips, a lot of developers tend to forget that they not only need to worry about code, but also about usability and SEO.
Jan 28, 2010 at 7:11 pm
“search engine crawlers only read basic html(no css what-so-ever)”
This is not true. At least the Googlebot does read some CSS. It can identify some dodgy techniques some webmasters use to hide links, and it also tends to ignore content which is located within an element that has a stlye=”display:none” on it. Giving an element a margin which puts it outside the screen is also a bad idea. These are just three examples.
It is true, however, that it’s always far better to use a proper HTML tag for a headline instead of another tag which is just styled to the human eye as if it were a headline.
Google does also look into Javascript and Flash nowadays. It even accesses pages which are not even linked to using anchors <a>, but onclick events. One of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen is that Google indexed content of a page which was eventually loaded via GET in Ajax.
Otherwise, this is a nice basic list. One could summarize it in a sentence: “Use HTML tags the way they are intended.” One nice example is tables. Many web designers still use them to position their graphic elements. They learnt it this way. Maybe this is partly Adobe’s fault as the HTML output of good ol’ Adobe ImageReady always used tables to make slices. Another reason are definitely Microsoft’s Internet Explorer versions 5.5 and 6.
Jan 28, 2010 at 7:15 pm
hmmm… could you please delete that anchor in my last comment? Didn’t know HTML wasn’t filtered here, sorry.
Jan 28, 2010 at 8:34 pm
@mk: thanks a lot for the feedback man; I removed the no css whatsoever part because you’re totally right about that.
Jan 29, 2010 at 2:57 am
Great article for anyone that needs SEO in a nutshell but what about the optimization in the coming months / year. One act that is quickly losing favor with search engines is the act of manipulating meta tags or other elements of a website or page that we’ve been so used to working on.
I really am interested in how the recent integration of twitter, the soon to be indexing of facebook’s newest step towards transparency and social media overall will really change what the most effective ways to optimize really are.
The mentions of google taking loading speed into consideration will add yet another element. How important this is is yet to be seen. Don’t get me wrong. I thought the post was great but there are more things to consider and I’m curious to see how they come into play in the future.
Jan 29, 2010 at 10:21 am
@Jeff: Thanks for the feedback :)
As stated in the title of this article, it’s 10 “basic” seo tips..
Check out http://devmoose.com/coding/10-ways-to-instantly-speed-up-your-website for ways to increase the loading speed of your website.
This will increase SEO as well in the upcoming months ;)
Jan 31, 2010 at 10:05 am
Nice post JP. Proper use of the tags is important; there are many on the web who use screen readers to help read out the webpage for them – perhaps because they are blind/partially sighted, or that they may be illiterate. Filling the tag descriptively of what the image is certainly is a plus when ranking is taken into account. Making your site more accessible to everyone is something every good webmaster should be aware of, including those who may not necessarily be able to see the text or images, and I believe you will get rewarded for taking these considerations into account.
Nice post!
Feb 01, 2010 at 9:00 am
Thanks for such useful information specially about the Robot.txt, i never looked in that view.
Feb 01, 2010 at 6:38 pm
wicked article star !!!
no ramp with seo
Feb 02, 2010 at 4:22 am
Thnk u for the usefull info ..
Feb 02, 2010 at 7:52 am
Great tips, we are updating an old site at work and most of these tips will come in very useful.
Feb 03, 2010 at 6:45 pm
Does Search Engines still consider the first para as the most important? That is an old concept IMO. Nice tips :)
Feb 03, 2010 at 6:47 pm
Well done, my Form Filler plugin didnt fill in my name. So here it is ;)
Feb 06, 2010 at 2:23 am
thanks JP for this nice SEO tips.
Feb 06, 2010 at 5:06 pm
Great article. These tips are simple but very effective.
Feb 08, 2010 at 10:37 pm
Great basic tips! To increase traffic, online databases can also be made SEO-friendly. Caspio has a cool new SEO deployment tool http://bit.ly/bBkDhp
Feb 17, 2010 at 2:27 am
Hmmmm……Very helpful info. Thanks much!
Feb 18, 2010 at 11:29 am
hello , i’m just starting in this world of blogs
I’ve been into SEO recently and gathering helpful information for this.
and after reading your post it has become a little easier to me , thanks
Mar 18, 2010 at 3:03 pm
Thanks dude, i love your seo ideas. Keyword analysis is the most important and hard work in search engine optimization. Google top and expensive keywords are very important to find out. Worth reading SEO article mate. I am going to bookmark your site, Cheers.
Apr 15, 2010 at 5:14 am
Its really very Great basic tips.I hope These tips are simple but very effective. thanks for sharing the great ideas…..
Apr 15, 2010 at 1:03 pm
You’re welcome!
Jun 17, 2010 at 11:58 am
Very good summary of SEO tactics. Thanks.
Ron
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