SEO for beginners - Website Optimization

SEO Best Pracises Part I - Website Optimization!

Website optimization 
 

• Page titles are an important aspect of search engine optimization

If you build a static site, every html page should have a unique page title. If you build a dynamic webpage, the CMS should give you this opportunity.  

• Use description meta tags to provide both search engines and users with a summary of what your page is about! 

Same as above, edit directly the description meta tags in your html code or do it through your CMS, if it is about a dynamic website.

•  Make use of friendly URLs

The friendly URLs are set with some rules in the code. For example the friendly URL http://www.test.gr/Services/3 is derived from the url  http://www.test.gr/index.php?page=services&category_id=3.

In order to convert the URL, I used a technique known as URL Rewriting (http://www.addedbytes.com/for-beginners/url-rewriting-for-beginners/) and created a Rule like this:

RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z_]+)/([0-9]+)/?$ index.php?page=$1&category_id=$2 [L]  

The server will check the URL of every request to the site to see if the "green" pattern matches. If it does, then Apache will swap the URL of the request for the "red" section that follows.

  

• Make your site easier to navigate. 

A good practice is to put an HTML site map page on your site, and use an XML Sitemap file. There are many tools for creating your xml sitemap. I use GsiteCrawler. After creating the sitemap, I submit it at webmaster tools of google, but I'll talk about it in another post.

  

• Offer quality content and services

That's the most important factor! A great example is my blog. Type "fckeditor styles phplist" and you'll see I am in the first page of google, and the reason for this is that the main content of my blog til now is about phplist and fckeditor!

• Use descriptive anchor texts.

• Optimize the use of images by using the 'alt' attribute

• Use heading tags appropriately 

Each page should contain one H1 tag. Apart from h1, we should use and other headings (h2, h3). Another good practice is the use of bold format in the text. This way we give crawlers a better idea of the most important parts of our documents. So, it is very important to have the right content and the right words.

 

These are some of the basic practises regarding the process of website optimization. After doing all these steps, I always validate my sites according to W3C standars using the following URL http://validator.w3.org/