The problem with SEO is that it can be much more difficult to optimize a website that’s already built; the ideal situation is to plan how to make your website irresistible to search engines right from the start. This is your chance to make something that’s optimized in every way conceivable; an ideal base for your off-site efforts. 

So where to start? As you will probably have been told many times before, unique content is the most important thing you can have when it comes to on-site SEO. But what is content? Well there are a whole range of types, and if possible you should be using all of them if you want to have the best chance on the search engines. 

• News (external) – This is news which is not related to your company and must not be promotional. This is used for the purposes of short term traffic from news syndication services. To be recognized as a news source on Google News you need to be adding several stories every week at the least.

• News (internal) – Post news about your company on your news section. If possible someone in house should be in charge of this as all too often it gets neglected for months on end. 

• Press releases – Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to wait until you have huge news to produce a press release. However, don’t be expecting any column inches; releases online are used to get powerful backlinks and ‘buzz’ online.

• Blog articles / thought leadership – There are blogs out there in every industry posting useful information and opinions every day. Not only should you be doing the same thing, you should be looking to establish relationships with other blog owners to produce guest posts from an industry perspective.  A good blog article with sticky content can act as ‘bait’ to encourage people to link back to your website by re-posting your content on their blogs and websites.

• White papers – These are extended reports which are informative to those within the industry. They will hopefully gain good backlinks if written well and will also help to cement a position as opinion leader in the industry.

• Statistics / Infographics – If you have the resources, commission small surveys concerning hot industry topics. The resulting data will allow you to produce intriguing infographics and statistical reports which people will want to link to if presented in the right way.  

Of course, despite content being so important, it’s not the only thing you need to consider. There are several important elements of your website which will help the search engines understand what your pages are about, thus making it more likely that your website will rank for important keywords.

• Meta Tags - Never underestimate the power of using relevant title tags and meta descriptions on each page. The crux of the page in a maximum of 4 words should be the first thing in the title, as this is what the search engines see as the most important element. If you need to put your company name on each page, you should do so at the end of the line. If the page in question is generated content like in one of the above methods, you should ensure that when the website is developed, it is set up to automatically put the title of the article in the title of the page. This is something that any web developer should have no trouble setting up. Remember – title tags are the most important on-site factor to affect your rankings.

• Headings – The main heading should be the major subject of the page, and when coded is known as the ‘H1’ tag. Less important titles should use a hierarchy based on their level e.g. H2, H3, H4.

• Google Webmaster Tools – You should be regularly checking the data given to you by this powerful free tool from Google. Useful information such as how often your website is ‘crawled’ (updated in its database) by Google, how many pages of your website are being used by the search engine, any duplicate meta tags it has detected and if there have been any errors such as pages not found or viruses detected. It will also allow you to point the search engine in the direction of your Sitemap.xml; a list of all the pages in your website written in a special code (XML) which makes it easier for the search engine to find and prioritise all of your pages.

• Robots.txt - A useful text file added to your website’s root directory which allows you to prevent certain search engine ‘robots’ from accessing your content. These robots are simply a name for the piece of software that search engines use to follow links around the web to find both new and updated content, keeping their search results up to date and fresh. Using the same file you can also prevent all robots from accessing certain content on your website, for example you could block them from accessing certain news pieces.

• Internal Links – The important thing to remember here is that if search engines can’t find a page on your website by following a link from another page, then chances are they won’t find it. The best way to get round this if some pages are usually hidden behind a search, members area or in some other way, create a simple directory structure allowing access to any of your content with just a few clicks. There is no limit to the number of pages here either; even Facebook manages to put all of its users in a directory. To see it for yourself, log out and find the link which says ‘People’ at the bottom of the homepage.

• User friendly link names – There is almost always a way to create user and search friendly link names for all pages on your website. All pages should have logical names in a pre-defined folder structure.

Once all of these elements have been combined, you should introduce them to your web developer at the earliest possible stage of the project. It’s important that the developer has knowledge of SEO before you take them on, as these elements will be vital to the long term success of your web presence.

Ask the developer for some examples of how they have implemented SEO friendliness into some of their previous projects. If they don’t understand what you mean when talking about any of the terms above, then you might wish to reconsider your choice.

I hope this was a useful guide for you – if you want to discuss SEO and your web development in more depth, free of charge, just give Cyber-Duck a call on 0208 736 0920  and ask to speak to Tom or Matt.