10 Secrets of SEO You Should Know About

SEO, or search engine optimization, may not be rocket science, but there are many things that you can do to make your website more findable on the web. There are a number of things that I do when I build my client sites that make a big difference in how they are found on the web. I won't share all of them (don't want to give away trade secrets), but there are some key things you should do.

I bring this up because I am amazed how few websites I see actually implement these items. These are reasonable simple things that you can do to improve your search rankings. Yet, for some reason, the majority of web developers don't even try to implement them.

Bear in mind, if you need help with this on your site or want an analysis of how you are doing, you can just contact us.

I have mentioned some of these before, but some of them are so important, they deserve another mention.

Meta Description: This should only be 150 characters including spaces. Some will say that you can have as much as 255 characters, but I like to limit the description. If you have a description on the page, it will appear in the search results at Google. This is your opportunity to put some great keywords for Google. Make sure that you get some great keywords in there. For example, it is far better to say, “Dealership Name provides businesses in the Los Angeles area with service and support for copiers, mfps and printers.” Than it is to say, “We provide your business with service on all your office equipment.”

Meta Keywords: These are top keywords that a page contains. It is a snapshot for search engines. There are two types of keywords that we need to worry about.
  1. Site wide keywords
  2. Page Specific Keywords
When considering keywords, you don’t want them to repeat on a page and, as a rule, you don’t want a total of more than 10 per page. So, if you select 5 site wide keywords, then there really shouldn’t be more than 5 additional keywords per page throughout the site. This is a loose restriction, but you should follow it as often as possible. If you need to make an exception, make them few and far between.

News and Blog: This allows for the constant updating of information and is critical for ongoing SEO. You should never let your site be considered to be built without the ability to constantly update with as much news and opinion pieces as possible.

RSS Feed: Search Engines like RSS. If you add news or a blog to your site (and you should), there needs to be a link to the RSS feed from the home page. This needs to provide both the news and blog feed. People should be able to subscribe to that feed and you should make sure that Google knows where to find it.

Home Page Design: Home page design is critical to the success of a site. Your end users need to know where to go when they get there... you don't want to give them too many choices or they may simply give up. The choices you do give them need to be clear. So, graphics (static and animated) are great for directing people to the right place. The challenge is that search engines don't really like images as much as test. So, I like the idea of putting the aggregate of your news and blog service below the fold (the bottom of the screen) on each page so that you have great links to your news and blog and your home page content gets refreshed often. If you don't want to aggregate all your news, at least put your recent posts in a block on the side like we have done at CopierCatalog.com.

Image Tag Attributes: Search engines can’t read images to know what is on them. Every image should have and ALT attribute and a TITLE attribute. Many times these can be the same. Usually, the ALT attribute will only have 3 or 4 words. The TITLE attribute can have as many as 10 or 12. Often, whatever text is on a button can be the TITLE attribute. If you don't add these attributes, then you are missing out on a great SEO opportunity.

Crosslinking: This is very critical throughout your site. Search engines find other pages in your site more quickly if there are links to them. Where ever you can link, you need to link. On landing pages, such as a Document Solutions landing page, it should have a link to all pages directly underneath it. Each page underneath the landing page should link back to it somehow, link to pages under it and possibly even link to each other. If you have a page on Printers, it better link to the Managed Print Services Page and vice versa as well as link to your printers product catalog. Whenever you can link to case studies or whitepapers or product catalogs or blogs or… you get the idea. When programming the links, all links should have a TITTLE and DESCRIPTION attribute. Often these can be the same, but usually, the title is only 3 -4 words and the description can be as much as 10 – 12 words. External links should open up in a new window.

301 Redirect: Why there was ever created a www subdomain, I’ll never know. It causes so many problems in so many way. But it is something that we have to deal with. Search engines don’t natively know what do to with inbound links. If an inbound link goes to http://example.com/ it is often treated differently than an inbound link going to http://www.example.com/. So, you need to set up a 301 Permanent Redirect on your site. There are a number of ways this can be done, but usually, you can only do it one way depending on your hosting. It might take a little research to get it done right.

Submission to search engines: You want to make sure that the engines know where your sites are. You'll want to make sure that your sites are submitted to search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search. Submitting your site is no guarantee they'll pick it up. In fact, Yahoo has a pay for submission to their direction at a cost of $300 per year... but it also provides no guarantee. You still need to make sure that you are submitted to all search engines.

Google Analytics: You can improve that which you don't track. You need an analytics service set up on your stie. We use Google Analytics. It integrates natively to our platform and allows for a number of incredible reports.

He also is the Chief Web Architect for Dealer Marketing Systems, the Editor in Chief for OfficeProductNews.net and provides a common sense approach to business and technology on his blog.

You can find him on Twitter, FriendFeed, and LinkedIn.