SEO | Site Design SEO

Site Design SEO

April 28, 2008 By: Justin | 5 comments

I mentioned before that there are many SEO factors, but it really comes down to two main factors.

Major SEO Factors

  • On site SEO
  • Off site SEO

It’s really that simple. You optimize your sites content, then you optimize the links pointing to your content. On a basic level, that is it. The issue is that I can break each of these factors down into many sub-factors.

In this lesson, I will be covering on site SEO factors.

On Site Search Engine Optimization

Site Address / URL

This the first factor that is considered by most new sites, but is not the most important. Its fairly minor, you could almost ignore it, but it does help. If you want the greatest advantage, you’ll use this factor.

Things to know

  • You want your URL to carry at least one of your keywords.
  • Keyword URL’s are harder to brand
  • Using dashes make URL’s look spamm
  • Google does not treat domain extensions differently (they may pay more attention to domains like .info though, so don’t throw ads on a .info quickly)

My URL for example is seozombie.com. I picked it for a few reasons. I picked .com because its most popular and easy to remember. I used SEO because one of my keywords is Nashville SEO and I wanted a URL with SEO in it. SEO Zombie is unique name and brand-able. So, I have a brand-able, easy to remember, url that includes one of my keywords.

Top Down Approach To On Site SEO

I’m just going to run through design factors from the top of a site down. These will be design / template factors. Not content factors. I’ll cover content SEO next.

Title SEO

Main Points for SEO Titles

  • Put keywords in title
  • Keywords BEFORE site name
  • Make title appealing to humans (they see in search results)
  • Make it unique. You do not want duplicate titles!
  • Do not stuff title with keywords
  • Keep within 63 characters

So, basically… always have a title, never leave it blank or “untitled”. Make sure the title is relevant to that pages content. Include keywords for that page in the title. Put the most important keyword first. If you’re going to include your site name, put it last. You need to make the title appealing to search engines AND humans. A good title will improve click thru rate from SERPS. You need to have a unique title for every page on your site! Do not stuff keywords. The more keywords, the less authority each receives. Leave it to 1-3 keywords.

For example, my home page title is:
Nashville SEO | Nashville Web Design
These tell Google the main keywords for my site.

And you’ll notice the title of each post comes BEFORE these when you look at a post.
This tells Google, the post title is MOST important (it comes first), but that the site overall is about “Nashville SEO | Nashville Web Design”

This is a good place to use keywords from your research. Main keywords on the home page title, long tails as focus of sub pages.

Meta Tags SEO

Meta tags are a factor for SEO, but do not count for much these days. One time during SEO history keywords were a major factor. When people learned this, people started to spam them with useless keywords. So Google responded by reducing their importance to almost nothing. They should not be ignore though. They have two purposes. One is a minor weight in authority, but the real importance is that many times search engines display their contents with your search results. A well written discription can increase your the number of people who click through to your site.

Here are my meta tags for example:
<meta name=“description” content=“SEO Zombie provides quality SEO and Online Marketing services in the Nashville, TN region. In addition we provide quality SEO lessons.” />
<meta name=“keywords” content=“Nashville Web SEO, Nashville SEO, Nashville Search Engine Optimization, Nashville Internet Marketing, Nashville Online Marketing” />
I’m not spammy in either, but manage to drop my keywords many times.

My Keyword Usage In My Description

  • SEO 3 times
  • Online Marketing 1 time
  • Nashville 1 time
  • Nashville, TN 1 time
  • SEO Zombie 1time

Then, I place my keywords into my keywords meta. I don’t over the top spam though.

Header Tags SEO

Header tags define a page’s organizational structure! They’re built in topic indicators in HTML. You need to use them. Google gives weight to words used in these tags. And provides benefits when used to structure a page’s content.

Header tags are: <h1>,<h2>,<h3>,<h4>

The header 1 tag is the top topic/theme, and they drop off in decending order. 1 > 4.

So, you’ll want to structure your site like this

<h1>Main Keyword</2>

<h2>Sub Topic 1</h2>

<h3>Specific Topic</h3>

<h2>Sub Topic 2</h2>

<h3>Specific Topic</h3>

Like you title, you want to have a unique h1 header on every page! You also want you <h1> tag near the top. You want it to be the first thing Google sees, or at least almost the first thing that it sees.

I use a script to generate my H1 tags for every page in the format “Post Title | Main Keywords”, the format being based off the same ideas as the title.

Menus SEO

You do not want to use any menu elements that will restrict Google from navigating your page correctly. So, here are a few rules.

MENU SEO RULES

  • NO FLASH MENUS!!!!
  • NO Javascript menus
  • NO dropdown menus

I’m not debating those. I don’t work with people who want them. And I don’t help people who refused to leave them behind. DO NOT DO THOSE THREE THINGS.

You want text links. Solid structured text links with proper anchor text and title attributes.

That’s the major thing. Menus aren’t too complicated. You can include keywords in your menu titles/headers, but it isn’t that big of a deal.

A slightly advance technique. The best practice is to not place anything in Google’s way when naviagiting a page. Most site’s HTML is in this order.

  1. Title
  2. Meta
  3. H1
  4. *MENU*
  5. Content
  6. Footer

See how the menu breaks the flow of the content? The best thing to do is put your content first, before the menu, and right after title, meta, h1. This can be done with CSS. You can place the content for the menu at the bottom and use CSS to place the menu (this isn’t a CSS blog, so I won’t be covering how to do CSS)

So, if you didn’t get that… this SHOULD be your layout.

  1. Title
  2. Meta
  3. H1
  4. Content
  5. Menu
  6. Foot

Footer

Not that big a deal, but at the bottom of everypage place a link back to your homepage. And use your keyword as the anchor text. This provides both SEO and accessability benefits.

You’ll see Nashville SEO linked back in my footer.

Clean Code

Lastly, and some debate this, is having clean code. You want to work hard to have clean standards compliant code. There is a debate about the importances of compliant code, but I’ll put it simply:

The cleaner the code, the less trouble Google has. The cleaner, the faster the DL speeds. The cleaner, the easier Google can understand.
Its not a MAJOR factor, but moving away from table layouts to XHMTL / DIVS + CSS help make your site easier to crawl.

Text Browser

I am often shocked at how often SEO and Internet Marketing and Make Money Online gurus ignore this.

You need to view your site in a text only browser! When you view your site in a text only browser, it removes all the special formating, graphics, javascript, and flash. It gives you a cut down version of your site.

And guess what?!?! This is how Google sees your site!! You can see exactly what Google sees!

Why more don’t talk about this, shocks me.

You need to structure your site properly in a text only format. If you have a hard time following your site in a text browser, Google will also have a problem.

The text browser I use is Lynx, you can find it via Google =P

Conclusion

Well, those are the major SEO factors that need to be considered when creating a design. In my next lesson I will continue with on site SEO by covering content SEO.

Post is part of our Search Engine Optimization Guide, that teaches basic SEO

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5 Comments »

Comment by Oleks Subscribed to comments via email
2008-09-25 11:53:04

Thanks for sharing useful thoughts :)

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