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.
