Formatting
Titles and metatags
Most webpages have three pieces of hidden information. They are:
- Title
- Keywords
- Description
In the source code of a webpage, they look like this;
<title>Online company formation with @UK PLC</title>
<meta name=”Description” content=”Form a company online within three hours with company registration agent @UK PLC”></meta>
<meta name=”KeyWords” content=”Company,formation,‘form a company’,‘company registration’”></meta>
Keywords should be separated by a comma with no spaces.
It’s largely believed that the top search engines now ignore the meta keywords and descriptions in terms of page ranking because of the abuse over the years by people putting in irrelevant content.
However, the title tag is usually displayed by the search engines in the search results, as can be the meta description, so these are still very important to get ‘right’ – the words are often the first view of your site that people see.
Tip: Use relevant page titles, meta keywords and meta descriptions
Good site code
Search engines use computer programs called "spiders" or "crawlers" to download your web pages and make sense of their content. Although these programs are very sophisticated, their job is made easier ( they are more reliable ) when processing pages with standards compliant HTML.
The Google spider wants to get through the content of your site as quickly as possible. Using CSS, you can remove a lot of the clutter in the source code for your webpage, which means the spider can get to your content quickly.
It also helps to use semantic markup. For example, using the HTML
eg.
<h2>How do I form a UK company?</h2>
<p>It’s simple to form a company – all you need to do is…</p>
<h2>How long does it take to form a UK company?</h2>
<p>Your company will be formed…</p>
It also helps to put as much proper content as possible as close to the beginning of your source code as possible. It’s possible to write webpages so that key words and phrases are at the start of your document (it’s good usability practice too).
There are plenty of tools out there to verify your site code. http://validator.w3.org/
ALT and TITLE tags in images
The use of ALT and TITLE tags within images is essential not only for good SEO but also for good usability and accessibility standards.
TITLE tags in text links
Use also the TITLE tag in the code for text links.
As well as detecting good practice the search engines can detect dubious practices, and can assign low scores to such pages or even remove them from their indices altogether.
Try the validator at http://validator.w3.org/
Usability and Accessibility
By making your website more accessible to web users, you’re also making it more accessible to search engines. Search engines can’t usually understand images, Javascript, Flash, audio and video content. By providing alternative content to each of these, search engines will have a better understanding of the purpose of your website.
The more confident a search engine is of what your website is about, all other things being equal, the higher it’ll place your website in the search rankings.
Tip: SEO is a by-product of Good Code, Usability and Accessiblity.
Site Map
Most search engine ‘spiders’ do not index below level 3.
In other words Google’s software will look at your homepage, the links from there and the links from there, but that’s it. So if you can link from the homepage (level1) to a Sitemap.htm page (level2) it should help them to find all your site pages (level3).
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/sitemap-generator.html#download
Tip: Link to a site map from the homepage
