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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Checklist

Accessible content

3. Be careful with images. Use CSS Image Replacement

Everyone by now is (hopefully) always setting the "alt" tag on any images they include on a page. However, search engines still treat these differently to straightforward HTML on the page. Following on from point #2 above,

<a href="graphics-card.aspx">Our Graphics Cards</a>

is generally weighted much more than

<a href="graphics-card.aspx"><img alt="Our Graphics Cards" src="graphics.gif" /></a>

If there are images on your site that aren't content in themselves (such as navigational links and headers), then you should be using a CSS Image replacement technique. This allows to you do something like this:

<a id="graphics_cards" href="graphics-card.aspx">Our Graphics Cards</a>
/* css */
#graphics_cards{
 display: block;
 text-indent: -5000px;
 background: url(graphics.gif);
 height: 25px;
 width: 25px;
}

This technique can (and should!) be applied to headers too, if you're using images there.

4. If you must use flash, put some text in too

Using something like SWFObject allows you to embed a flash movie, but also include a HTML equivalent that will be indexed by search engines, and viewable by users with flash or javascript disabled.

6. Ensure content is accessible via hyperlink (watch out for AJAX!)

Sounds simple, but if you're using any sort of form submission (such as a drop down box) or ajax-style scripts to navigate to content on your site, then your content is not going to be indexed unless you take a few further steps.

a) Ensure the content can be accessed directly from a distinct URL too (ideally in conjunction with url rewriting - see point #7). If you've got a drop down box listing frequently asked questions, when an item is selected, redirect the user to a unique url for that FAQ entry, rather than just post-ing back and adjusting the content of the page.

b) Ensure you've actually got links pointing to these distinct URLs (whether within elsewhere on the site, or externally). You could also use a Google SiteMap so that at the very least the search engine knows those pages exist. 

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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