SEO: Site Prep Paves the Way
by Alan Eggleston
Site Prep for SEO isn’t necessarily something that the Web Editor has a lot of influence over or that the Web Editor necessarily is aware of without some effort. However, the condition of the site “under the hood” can have a huge influence over site indexing and the resulting ranking of pages. Thus, as Web Editor, you should take interest in it and try to influence it.
Prepping the Source Coding
Go to any html, asp, or php Web page and with your mouse right-click on an empty space on the page. Scroll down to “view source” or “view page source” and click on it. You should see a page full of programming (source code) for your Web page.
It is very likely that if your website is written in JavaScript or CSS coding, there will be a lot of programming at the top of the page before you run into what you will recognize as your body text. Even if your page is heavy with videos or images or graphics or other material at the top of the page, you will have a lot of coding at the top of the source coding. Web designers and developers often aren’t aware that this is detrimental to indexing and may well result in a low ranking for the page. They may not even care – their job is to program the page, not market it.
To prep the page for SEO, make sure there is as little separation as possible between your meta data and the content: headlines, subheads, body text. If there is JavaScript or CSS coding, which is usually a lot of code, a search engine spider may decide the whole page is coding and not index your page. You will lose any relevancy you created by writing good content!
To eliminate this problem, all the designer/programmer/developer has to do is write the JavaScript or CSS code as a separate file and then place a simple instruction on the page telling the browser the name of the file and where to retrieve it. The file should be on the website server with the rest of the content files, but the coding doesn’t have to be on your page. If the programmer tells you that will lead to a time delay retrieving the instruction, tell them it’s insignificant – especially compared to people not being able to find the site at all.
I recognize that you may be reading this with a website already in progress or launched some time ago. You may have to keep these in mind for a redesign or relaunch some time in the future.
More Site Prep Hints
Try to make the first thing the search engine spider reads (after the </head> tag) is your main headline, which contains your keywords. (Sometimes things up in the header, left-hand column, navigation, and other spots will precede it in the programming, which means your keywords will be buried.) Work with your designer and programmer to achieve maximum possible placement. Follow that with body text and subheads as closely as possible.
Make sure your designer knows to use H tags (H1, H2, H3…) for headlines, subheads, and so on to maximize indexing. Also ensure that every headline is text – not a graphic or image. Designers will want to use a graphic for special fonts, but you will lose a lot of SEO value without those text headlines. Designers also tend to use a graphic for the site name in the header, but again, you lose SEO value that way. These all add up. If decisions are made above your pay grade to retain the graphic, make sure you give it an alt tag with the same text that’s on the graphic.
Ensure that every page has a page title and description and that they are all unique. Don’t let anyone tell you that it doesn’t matter.
No page should be without some kind of content. Even a page with images/videos or a form should have some kind of introduction that allows you to use keywords. Although the ideal length for indexing quality is 250-500 words, a few words is better than none at all. I’ve seen dropdown navigation that leads to a blank page simply because no one thought a reader might land there – wasted SEO!
Repeat your top navigation at the bottom of each page as hypertext links. This is also a good place to add hypertext links for additional lower-level pages like terms of use, privacy, resources, site map, and so on. Search engines read a page from the bottom up as well as from the top down and this gives the spider a second look at your navigation.
A big enemy to ranking is duplicate text. Sometimes cheaters will simply rip off your content and it may get indexed as the original text. One safeguard is adding canonical tags in the URLs noting that your page is the original text, which should protect you.
Rather than going through the hassle of uploading videos onto your own page and eating up valuable storage space on your server, embedding YouTube videos can actually boost your rankings. Simply create your own YouTube Channel, upload your videos to your channel, and then link to those videos from your website.
If you revise or revamp your website, try not to change the navigation and file names and types. If you have a services.html page on your original site, try to have another services.html page on your new one. This preserves the rank value you built from the original site onto the new site instead of having to start from scratch again.
When you name graphics and image files, and other files, try to name them with keywords – avoid number and random key configurations like you’ll find in automated naming systems, which won’t benefit you for search engine ranking.
Create the convention among your staff – writers, editors, designers, programmers, proofreaders – not to use outdated conventions like “click here” for links. Instead use keyword phrases as anchor text that will benefit you during indexing.
Topics I will introduce you to in the days ahead include:
Alan Eggleston is a freelance Web writer and Web editor for E-Messenger Internet Consulting Inc. Join him on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
