Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Checklist

Page 1 of 3
  1. Page titles and link text
  2. Accessible content
  3. Url rewriting

Page titles and link text

Search engine optimisation is pretty much part and parcel of creating websites these days. Getting the basics right don't require a large amount of work, but can make all the difference. Many of these also improve the general usability and accessibility of your site too - so you get three major benefits rolled into one.

The points below are just a few basics I've picked up along the way; roughly in order of my own priority, relating specifically to technical changes you can make on your own site, regardless of any incoming links, frequency of page updates, or link building you may do; I'm not claiming this is a comprehensive list by any means - but I'd be very interested to from others as to what they've found.

1. It's all about the page title!

If you can't spare time to do anything else, at least do this! Ensure there is a unique title for each page on your site, and make it as keyword rich, and relevant to the content on the page as you can. If you always include, say, a company name and tagline in the page title, that's great - but it's generally a good idea to ensure the portion relevant to the page appears first. Seach engines truncate the titles, so it makes sense to have the most relevant and useful information at the start - and the consistent company name and tagline at the end - for both users scrolling through pages of results, and for the engines themselves.

2. Think about the text being used to link to pages

We've all seen Google "bombing" in action - the most famous being "miserable failure" taking you straight off to the white house. Interestingly, Google has now pulled the plug on that particular quirk. However, the general rule remains the same - if a search engine picks up a link with the text "great .NET products", even if the page itself doesn't mention those particular keywords, you can still be listed in those search results.

If you find yourself creating a bunch of hyperlinks along the lines of "Find more here", "more information", "click here" - you're wasting a potential goldmine of keywords, and from an accessibility angle, each distinct URL linked to from a page should have distinct text associated with it anyway . Think twice as to whether you can include some more relevant keywords in the link text, such as "Find more developer jobs here".

You might also like...

Comments

About the author

James Crowley

James Crowley United Kingdom

James first started this website when learning Visual Basic back in 1999 whilst studying his GCSEs. The site grew steadily over the years while being run as a hobby - to a regular monthly audien...

Interested in writing for us? Find out more.

Contribute

Why not write for us? Or you could submit an event or a user group in your area. Alternatively just tell us what you think!

Our tools

We've got automatic conversion tools to convert C# to VB.NET, VB.NET to C#. Also you can compress javascript and compress css and generate sql connection strings.

“C++ : Where friends have access to your private members.” - Gavin Russell Baker