How To Create Search Engine Friendly Websites!

I’ve been reading Matt McGee’s Small Business SEM blog with greater frequency in recent months and recommend that other small business owners invest a few hours to take a look as well. In addition to some great posts on practical search engine optimization strategies for small businesses, Matt usually recaps the search engine related conferences that he is in attendance for (I actually found the Small Business SEM site while browsing Flickr for SES NY conference photos). His recent post, “How to SEO Your Site in Less Than 60 Minutes” gives website owners a nice checklist of things to look for when evaluating the “SEO Quality” of their website (or they’re competitors).
I’m frequently asked to evaluate a website owner’s strategy for search engine optimization or asked comparable SEO related questions from small business owners that I meet on a regular basis. As search engine optimization and search marketing become more mainstream, business owners looking to create, improve or extend their marketing strategy online are looking for best practice guidelines for implementing and developing an SEO related strategy. Here is a list of search engine friendly factors that every website owner or webmaster should consider when building, or rebuilding, a website designed with search engine optimization in mind.
 
The Programming Code
Whether you are using HTML, PHP or any other form of programming code for building web pages, consider the following:

• Use a CSS file to define font characteristics, page properties and visual appearance. In today’s design environment, a good CSS designer can create an entire website that’s visual appearance is completely controlled using one central CSS file.
  
• If you are not going that far, at least make certain that all CSS files and JavaScript files are linked from an external location. This means that the actual code is not on the web page itself, but referenced from a different location in the website structure.
  
• Avoid “code bloat“. When building a site from scratch, limiting the amount of extraneous HTML and web design code is best practice for providing an environment for a search engine to crawl and index the page the most efficiently.

How to SEO Your Site in Less Than 60 Minutes!

I’ve been a bad blogger. I’m swamped at work and have been distracted outside of work, and I’ve been trying to get by here on SBS with list links and even some of my best Flickr photos. I can’t remember the last time I posted something helpful / educational. My bad….
Let me take a stab at making things better.
I often get asked to review a web site and give quick feedback on the site’s SEO. The issue: Is the site doing well, or in desperate need of SEO help? To answer those questions, I’ve developed a speedy system to go through a site and take a quick SEO snapshot. I’m going to give that system away here. On a smaller site, this should take about 20 minutes. Even on the biggest sites, it’s never taken me more than an hour.
 

SEO Your Site in Less Than an Hour

A. Visit the home page, www.domain.com.

1. Does it redirect to some other URL? If so, that’s bad.
2. Review the Page Title. Does it use relevant, primary keywords? Is it formatted correctly?
3. Review site navigation:
   • Format — text or image? image map? javascript? drop-downs? Text is best.
   • Page URLs — look at URL structure, path names, file names. How long are URLs? How far away from the root are they? Are they separated by dashes or underscores?
   • Are keywords used appropriately in text links or image alt tags?
4. Review home page content:
   • Adequate and appropriate amount of text?
   • Appropriate keyword usage?
   • Is there a sitemap?
   • Do a “command-A” to find any hidden text.
   • Check PageRank via SearchStatus plugin for Firefox
5. View source code:
   • Check meta description (length, keyword usage, relevance).
   • Check meta keywords (relevance, stuffing).
   • Look for anything unusual/spammy (keywords in noscript, H1s in javascript, etc.).
   • If javascript or drop-down navigation, make sure it’s crawlable.
   • Sometimes cut-and-paste code into Dreamweaver to get better look at code-to-page relationship.

B. Analyze robots.txt file. See what’s being blocked and what’s not. Make sure it’s written correctly.
C. Check for www and non-www domains — i.e., canonicalization issues. Only one should resolve; the other should redirect.
D. Look at the sitemap (if one exists).

1. Check keyword usage in anchor text.
2. How many links?
3. Are all important (category, sub-category, etc.) pages listed?

E. Visit two category/1st-level pages.
Repeat A1, A2, A3, A4, and A5 – this will be quicker since many objects (header, footer, menus) will be the same. In particular, look for unique page text, unique meta tags, correct use of H1s, H2s to structure content.
Check for appropriate PageRank flow. Also look at how they link back to home page. Is index.html or default.php appended on link? Shouldn’t be.
F. Visit two product/2nd-level pages.
Same steps as E.
Also, if the site sells common products, find 2-3 other sites selling same exact items and compare product pages. Are all sites using the same product descriptions? Unique content is best.
G. Do a site:domain.com search in all 3 main engines.
Compare pages indexed between the three. Is pages indexed unusually high or low based on what you saw in the site map and site navigation? This may help identify crawlability issues. Is one engine showing substantially more or less pages than the others? Double-check robots.txt file if needed.

(Note: The above is no longer a way to view supplemental results in Google, and Google has said it no longer distinguishes between a main set of results and a supplemental set.)
I. Use Aaron’s SEO for Firefox extension to look at link counts in Yahoo and MSN. If not in a rush, do the actual link count searches manually on Yahoo Site Explorer and MSN to confirm.
…..END…..
That’s what I do when making a quick SEO site analysis. Important: This is for identifying problems, not fixing them. And it doesn’t replace a real and complete SEO analysis. (There are several shortcomings, for example. Here’s one: Steps E and F assume that all category pages across the site will be the same, and that all product pages will be the same. This is not always the case, so you may miss problems/issues that a real, deeper analysis would reveal.)
Questions for you:
- What other flaws do you find with this?
- What other steps do you take when doing a quick SEO analysis?


By Matt McGee http://www.smallbusinesssem.com

Read more: http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/how-to-seo-your-site-in-less-than-60-minutes/593/#ixzz1I0HQQkvU