Quality content is essential
People will visit your internet site if the search engine results page shows that your website has the information they are looking for.
That information needs to be original and clear. Write the content so that it explains itself well. Intersperse your pages' content with the "keywords" or "key phrases" that you want your site to be found by.
Try and keep one topic per page and keep paragraphs short. Most people "browse" the internet meaning they are skim reading -- so shorter paragraphs work better online.
Search engines can't index the meaning or words of a graphic or photo. You need to therefore write in the html code what the meaning is. eg. instead if using logo.gif try company-name-logo.gif
When up of 80% of your customers come to your website from a search engines then SEO is important, coming to a broken page is just not acceptable. And so is not finding the information you where after? You may even have the best 404 error message but what good does that do for those customers, they are gone?
Clean logical structure
It is very beneficial to write html code that is marked up correctly. Only add mark-up to aid the design after the content is written.
If a phrase is a heading, then mark it up as such eg. <h1>, <h2> to <h6> etc. Don't write everything in <h1> tags just because you might to trick the search engines -- it won't work.
If you want to emphasis a point, mark up the text by using the <strong> or <em> tags -- then use the CSS to modify/control the visual appearance of the text.
Don't use tables to design and layout the site. Instead layout the design using CSS. Format the normal html markup with CSS so that extra tags are kept to a minimum.
Follow the web standards groups suggestions
There is a group called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These people help to make the web a better safer place. They have a helpful list of quality tips for webmasters.
Some of the things the W3C list on their website are:
- <title>: the most important element of a quality Web page
- Don't use "click here" as link text
- Use standard redirects: don't break the back button!
- Use h1 for top-level heading
- Use the alt attribute to describe the function of each visual
- Don't forget to add a doctype
- Use <link>s in your document
- If You Pick One Colour, Pick Them All
- Care With Font Size
- Use international date format
- Use headings to structure your document
- Choose URIs wisely
- Unordered lists: more than just bullets
SEO Tools of the trade
Use a better web browser like Firefox as it has many great time saving extensions especially for web developers and SEO research like CustomizeGoogle.
You will need to have many links back to your website. To see how you are going re link backs, you can use a Link Popularity Checker - Instant, online reports of a site's link popularity rating in 4 top search engines, including Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN, and Teoma (Ask Jeeves) - FREE!
Good sign posting
Don't loose your page ranks -- they are hard to come by -- and can't be bought.
When you move or rename a web page that has been online for a while, it is recommended that you put a redirection system/page in place so that that any visits/hits to the old page will be forward to the new location.
If you permanently remove a page and won't be replacing it, then your visitors will see a 404 error page meaning that the page that was requested couldn't be found. It is good practice to have a nice error page that simply informs visitors that the page has been removed and offer them some options to maybe a search box, sitemap or homepage etc. so that they can stay on your website.
Doing these things, especially the redirects, is good as that page you moved may have had a high/good page rank that can be passed onto the new page (in time).
