Building a new website is a great opportunity to make sure that the whole site is as optimised as possible, ensuring that straight out of the starting block your site will get great results and work its way up the search engine results pages as quickly as possible.
There are several in site factors to ensuring that your site is Search Engine Friendly:
1. Your site must be transparent to the search engine spiders, easy for the crawlers to find and to index.
2. Your internal linking must be well designed so that PageRank is directed to your most important and relevant pages for your chosen keywords and phrases.
3. Your content must be structured to provide maximum clarity and allow the search engines to establish your keywords accurately and quickly.
In the process of indexing your site the Search Engine spiders must be able to quickly and easily read your content. For this reason it is important that as much as possible you should use W3C compliant html for your content, avoiding code heavy technologies like AJAX, Flash or Javascript as much as is possible. If these scripts are necessary it may be an idea to pull them out of the main html and just reference them, rather than including the code within the html. Any files or pages that are not assisting your SEO strategy, in as far as reinforcing the topics and themes of the site goes, should be hidden from the search engines via the robots.txt file. No content page should ever be blocked but scripts and web apps are not needed for your SEO and can be hidden.
Linking Strategies are very important as the spiders will follow the route you have linked, thus the content along this path must reflect the themes and topics of your site very strongly. As well as providing a route to relevant data your linking strategy should be aiming to channel PageRank to the most important page in your site (here’s a tip, The most important page in your site is rarely the homepage), this way not only will it have a high level of importance, it will also have a good degree of relevance which will combine to give the page a really good quality score, a strong factor in placing high in the SERPs.
Structuring content is very important to your SEO strategy, each page should be focused on one topic, with the whole group of pages reinforcing the theme of the site. Avoid any duplication of content. Search Engines do not operate on the basis that a phrase repeated over and over again becomes a fact. Instead keep all your pages distinct from one another. In real world terms this will help you get more traffic as you are more likely to capture traffic from distinct searches rather than one core search term.
So, keep your code simple, light and compliant, link your pages to create a funnel so that PageRank is greatest in your most effective pages and keep your content distinct and clear. Finally don’t leave anything static. Search Engines like sites that are maintained, there are thousands of abandoned sites out there and you want yours to appear active and vibrant if you are to place high in SERPs.
SEO Junkies live and breathe SEO, for more advice, SEO training and direct SEO on your site please do give us a call.