What's Are The Technical "Must Do's" To Ensure Your Site Is SEO Friendly...?

[Beau]

Hi all...
Aside from the usual traffic generating techniques (eg article marketing, back links etc etc) I'm keen to know how to best set up your website and it's various pages on a technical level so that it is SEO friendly...

Any thoughts?

:-) Beaumont

[Tyrus Antas]

• Use friendly URLs. Depending on what platform you use to publish your content that might be as simple as installing a plugin or as hard as using mod_rewrite. Wordpress is generally, a SEO friendly platform.
• Avoid duplicate content and when you can't avoid, use the canonical tag.
• Make sure you website is up and running most of the time. You don't want Google's spider to visit you when your server is down.
• The bulk of your content should be basic html, no javascript. While Google claims to be able to understand javascript links, you should still be on the safe side and use plain text links for menus.
• Use Google's Webmaster Central

[SusanneUK]

Originally Posted by Tyrus Antas

• Avoid duplicate content and when you can't avoid, use the canonical tag.

Can you give further explanation of the above point please, have wondered what "Canonical" is for isntance.

Thanks
Sue

[Tyrus Antas]

Originally Posted by SusanneUK

Can you give further explanation of the above point please, have wondered what "Canonical" is for isntance.

Thanks
Sue

If you have duplicate content on your website, either because of structural issues(tags, directory structure) or because of other reasons like user generated content and republishing of old content, you can tell search engines which version to index so has to not cause duplicate content indexing issues.

For more information:
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Specify your canonical

[Nicholas William]

beau

here are a few tips to help you along mate...

A title tag:
that has your main keywords for the page, a synonym, plus a nice attention grabbing line that will catch viewers eyes in the search results ( eg: curry fish fingers, we have the most delicious tandoori cod sticks)

meta tags:
keywords (dont double up, use plurals, related terms)
description (short and sweet just like your title tag)

h1 tag:
put your main keyword for the page as the first heading in the content

body:
good keyword density in your main content

bold, italics:
within your content, markup your keywords using the <b> and <i> tags

alt tags:
put images of your keyword (eg, curry fish stick photos) and make sure that the images have the keywords as the filename (curry-fish-finger.jpg) along with alt tags using the keywords

contextual links:
link to other pages in your site using keywords buried within your content

keywords in your page name:
www.yourdomain.com/fishfingers/curry-fish-sticks.htm

an internal linking structure:
put all of the related pages in a folder and have them link to an index page within that folder, this will push pagerank from pages to the folder index and then the main site index

That's all I can think of right now, it's Sunday night and I'm dead tired from the weekend so let me know if you need more help okay. best of luck!

oh one last thing. All though I've given you alot of direction in using keywords, dont go overboard because the google algorythm doesnt like you using too much so read up on acceptable keyword density and various things that you work against you

[SusanneUK]

Originally Posted by Tyrus Antas

If you have duplicate content on your website, either because of structural issues(tags, directory structure) or because of other reasons like user generated content and republishing of old content, you can tell search engines which version to index so has to not cause duplicate content indexing issues.

For more information:
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Specify your canonical

Thanks so much.

Sue