A basic SEO tips Checklist

Getting the basics of search engine optimisation right for any website is essential for anyone involved in marketing or running a website. Fortunately nowadays Google are a lot more open and engaging about what they consider good practices for websites. We definitely don’t have to second guess our SEO as much as we used to.

What I’ve listed below is just a starting point and is my summary of what Google are advising us makes a good search engine optimised website.

Create unique, accurate page titles

Make UNIQUE page titles! If you have duplications in your page titles Google will assume you are duplicating the content of you’re website. Which is not good…

The format I use generally is:

[Main keyword of page] | [Secondary keywords] | [Website or company name]

As on Cycles UK’s website:

Mountain bikes | Shop for bikes online or in store | Cycles UK

Description meta tags

Google ‘might’ use these so it’s definitely worth making sure they are in place. No need to repeat your keywords or do lists of keywords. Just show useful information about the page it relates to. As with titles, make sure they are all unique and relevant… Easy.

Structure of your URLs

With URLs it’s always best to use keywords, not numbers. A good structure would be:

http://www.cyclesuk.com/mountain-bikes/full-suspension

Not

http://www.cyclesuk.com/108/447920

At Cycles UK I’ve realised we don’t quite do this as good as it could be so ‘improve URL structure’ has gone on my to-do list!

A good tip is the use of a dash (-). Rather than ‘/mountainbikes’ or ‘/mountain_bikes’, use the dash ‘/mountain-bikes’ instead. When Google crawls your URL it will split words up however you present them but other search engines may not be so advanced. The general standard for splitting these words up is a dash although if your URLs don’t use them it’s not worth changing. I think it’s easier to read as well.

Site navigation

The basics here is always have text html links somewhere on the page. If you have to have a menu made from images, repeat the menu in the footer as pure text. Breadcrumbs are also very useful both for the user and for search engines to crawl.

Content

The content of a website is the most important element. It’s essential not to get bogged down in SEO by trying to work out keyword density and potentially making a page unreadable for the sake of getting higher up the search engines. If you’re writing about about a specific subject, the search engines will be able to pick up on what is relevant on the page as long as you’re not tackling too many subjects per page. Just stick to the subject of the page and be useful and relevant.

Anchor text

Using keywords in your anchor text (the text a user click on) is a great way of letting the search engines know the relevance of a link. So steer clear of writing your anchor text with terms like ‘click here’ and ‘read more’. Instead go for descriptive keywords. If your linking to mountain bikes then instead of:

For more information about our mountain bikes click here

Go for something more like:

Find out more about our range of mountain bikes

Heading Tags

The html Heading tags (<h1> <h2> <h3> etc…) have a great deal of importance for SEO in determining the subject and relevance of a page for the search engines.

<h1> most important. For example: <h1>Bicycles</h1>

Then <h2>. For example: <h2>Mountain bikes</h2>

Then <h3>. For example: <h3>Hardtail mountain bikes</h3>

And so on…

Personally I think you should try and only have one <h1> tag per page for maximum relevance although in practice I find this rarely happens. It certainly doesn’t on our CyclesUK website (something else on my to-do list!). What often happens is that due to CCS styling, menu headers are set as <h1> tags which means you lose relevance.

Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide is a must read. Even if you’re experienced in SEO, it’s worth reminding yourself of the SEO best practices within it’s pages.