Building a new site? What SEO consideration to bear in mind
May 19th, 2008 by Dan
When developing a site from scratch SEO is a lot easier than doing it on an existing site, and as someone who does both, you can trust me on this one. So I am going to go over some of the basics to get it right first time, and if you’re lucky I might give you some tips on avoiding the Google sandbox.
1) Make sure you’ve done your keyword research, look for niches in your market place. As a new site some of the more competitive words are just out of reach unless you plan on using black hat methods, which in the end will do you more harm than good.
2) Remember to put content relating to your keyword on the same page. It’s no good telling Google in your keyword meta tag that your page is about “cat food” and then not mentioning it in anywhere in the content of that page.
3) URL: Make sure your URL relates to your keyword. This is especially the case when it comes to products, a URL which is something like this “www.example.co.uk/ index.php?shop=&cPath=&cPath=516&osCsid=m675iqgulbe9sbib7f329kbng5″Is no good for user or search engine. A good URL rewriter will be able to make it look like this www.example.co.uk/cat-food. Note the dash between words.
4) Name your Image correctly. If you have an image of “Joes cat food” name it “jo-cat-food.jpeg”, image search is a big thing and only set to get bigger.
5) Finally Validation errors, these stop the spider from crawling your site fully and efficiently.
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