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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Checklist

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  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".

Comments

  1. 07 Jan 2009 at 23:12
    Asp.net URL Rewriting To automize url rewriting procedure you can use [ http://dotnetguts.blogspot.com/2008/07/url-rewriting-with-urlrewriternet.html](http:// http://dotnetguts.blogspot.com/2008/07/url-rewriting-with-urlrewriternet.html)
  2. 24 Dec 2008 at 06:58
    Hi, James Crowley 1. Google shows only title & description in it's result. So, title tag and description tag is most important to improve click through rate and search engine indexing. 2. If your link is popular so, you will get more benefit. That's right..... But, all this techniques and method will observe by expert SEO. So, can i [hire SEO](http://www.cyberthinkinfotech.com/seo-services.php) for that?
  3. 05 Jun 2007 at 10:19

    Ever have a shopping cart page that just lists items in the cart - a checkout page or perhaps a page that shows you the Please Wait Timer - also some work arounds for some things you create a BLANK html document - why ON earth would you want these to be found...Answer you would not.. 

    So you can see there are valid reasons for not having some pages indexed. Of course not all crawlers look for that file..

  4. 24 Apr 2007 at 18:10

    I've been reading much about SEO and came across the Meta Robots Tag. I've read many artcles that explain how to use this tag to stop some robots form indexing certain pages  - So my question is:

    What are some reasons that I wouldn't want the spiders to scan certain pages?

    I thought the purpose of getting pages scanned was to find relevant links, keywords, meta tags etc., helping with a possible higher ranking and placement of the site.

    Thanks,

    John Conway

  5. 21 Apr 2007 at 11:53

    sir could u solve my two problems

     

     

     

    whicha r as foollows:

    1. as i can get ip address,city,username,computername,date,time

     

    but i am  not benn able to get its country name,location in asp.net 2.0

     

    plz he lp me

     

    2.as i want to create an function that check whether email id exist on any server or not fo ex to check

    yash_coolbuddy_forindia@yahoo.co.in

    i want to check whether this id exist on yahoo server or not in asp.net 2.0.

    plz help me as soon as possible bcz due too this i am not able to make my project

     

    i hope u will not dissapoint me

    thanking u

  6. 01 Jan 1999 at 00:00

    This thread is for discussions of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Checklist .

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James Crowley 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 audience ...

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