You’d think that given the amazing scope of the Internet, truly basic, simple best practices for search engine optimization would be outlined in a simple checklist somewhere. I haven’t seen it, and based on the questions people have been asking at Chicago’s SEO Meetup, I think we must publish one, yes?
This checklist assumes that you A) have a Web site, and B) haven’t got a clue how to begin optimizing it for search engines. If you *do* know some stuff, then you can skip to the end. Time saved already!
*1) Have an interesting Web site that people want to look at.*
A lot of people skip this step. If your stuff is good, it will be popular — and search engines respect popularity.
*2) Have good <title> tags.*
The “title” tag of a page appears at the very top of your browser window. Check various pages on your site and see what the titles look like. Every page is unique, and should have a unique, accurate title. Let’s say your company’s called “WidgetCorp”, and you have a press release announcing some new product.
*Bad:* “WidgetCorp Press Release”
*Better:* “WidgetCorp Announces Three New Bluetooth-Enabled Widgets for Toddlers”
See the difference? There are other important benefits. Not only will this improve your search engine rankings, but anyone who bookmarks this page will have a good description of the page in their bookmarks menu. Additionally, engines like Google will display this text in search engine results; the more informative it is, the more likely searchers are to actually click on it.
*3) Have good META descriptions.*
The meta description isn’t displayed anywhere in your browser, but it’s important. It should be one or two succinct sentences describing your page; you can check your page’s meta description by going to “View Source” and looking for code like this:
<meta name=”description” content=”Description appears here.” />
This text gives search engines a little something to chew on, but that’s not even the best part. When your pages appear in Google search results, this description will appear underneath the link to your page. Again, informative, concise language will give searchers all the more reason to click on *your* page versus whatever else Google turned up.
*4) Use “valid code”*
“Valid code” means using HTML that follows specific rules, as defined by the Web Consortium. Now, if you go to your programmer and demand “valid code”, they may freak out on you a little. True validity is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to achieve, and it’s not necessary to score 100% on your validity test. On a practical level, it’s just a question of making your pages easier for a robot/crawler/spider to read. As long as your pages aren’t horrendously broken, you can move on.
*5) Register your site with Google*
We’ve come a long way — ten years ago, if you wanted to submit your site to a search engine, you simply sent them your home page’s URL. They’d say, “We’ll think about it”, and that was it.
Nowadays, you can go to “Google’s Webmaster Tools”:https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools section and register your site. They’ll give you some instructions on “verifying” your site; once that’s done, they’ll tell you all kinds of interesting stuff. They’ll tell you whether your pages are indexed, which ones, and they’ll even give you some hints on what to work on.
For example, they’ll advise you to…
*6) Submit a “sitemap”*
A sitemap (in the context of SEO) is an XML file, produced by you or your programmers, that simply lists out all the pages in your site. Again, in the old days, you could only submit your home page, and just once. Now, you can give Google a list of every single URL in your site, in XML format. There are some free tools out there that might help you, but if you have a programmer working on your site, ask them if they can set something up to update your sitemap automatically.
*7) Get other sites to link to yours*
It’s a simple concept; search engines respect popularity. If a thousand blogs or whatever are putting links to your site from theirs, Google’s going to take that as a cue to elevate you in their search results. How do you get links to your site? See Step 1 above, of course. Beyond that, linkbuilding is too deep a topic for this checklist. Just remember that every link to a page on your site is a vote, and one that will slightly increase your rank in the search engines.
Ok, so that’s the basic checklist. To recap:
1) Always respect your unique value proposition
2) Write good page titles
3) Write good meta descriptions
4) Make your HTML as valid as possible
5) Register your site with Google Webmaster Tools
6) Submit a sitemap to Google
7) Get other sites to link to yours
Once you’ve done all of these to the best of your ability, wait a few weeks, and your search engine visibility will improve dramatically, and you’re ready to move on to the more advanced stuff:
* “Beginners Guide to Search Engine Optimization”:http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization
* “How can I create a Google-friendly site?”:http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40349&topic=8522
If you’re in Chicago, you can come by the “Chicago SEO Meetup”:http://www.ChicagoSEO.org/, where professional SEO practitioners drop kung-fu on each other monthly.
