Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Best Practices
Aug 4, 2009 pay per click, seo, web building
To leverage your PPC ad spend, it’s crucial to have a website and/or landing page that is optimized for search. The following is a list of some of the processes we perform in order for your website to be easily found on the web.
1. 301 redirect - This is a server setting (in our case Apache) For example, http://yoursite.com will automatically redirect to http://www.yoursite.com This is important since you always want Google to index the “same” URL version of your website.
In the .htaccess file on the Apache server, the following code needs to be inserted
-
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^emeraldcoastdesign.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.emeraldcoastdesign.com/$1 [L,R=301]
2. Create a “robots.txt” file in the root directory of the server. This tells Google what directories to index and what directories not to index. For example, if there is a directory where all of your video media is stored, you would want to “Disallow” that directory to be read. Whereas, if you have a directory that contains the majority of your keyword-rich content, you would want Google to read that and only that content since it is relevant to the search terms that you would like to be found for.
3. Always separate the “style” from the “content” by creating a separate style sheet. This makes it easy for the Google Bot to distinguish between your relevant “content” and your source code.
4. Always provide keyword rich descriptions in the “alt” tags of your images.
5. Try to use text in your navigation bar rather than images. This is because text can be “crawled” by the search engines.
6. Name your directories with good descriptive words. For example, if you have a “beach condo” website, name your main content directory “beach-condo”. By doing this, the search engines “see” your site as very relevant to “beach condo”!
7. Use a blog powered by Wordpress. Wordpress blogs are already fairly optimized for search engines and blogs are simply a great way for you to get great content uploaded quickly that the search engines love.
8. Use includes where possible. If you need to make changes on a site, make it easy on yourself by having common elements on your site split up into “includes”. There’s nothing more agonizing than wanting to make a small tweak for SEO sake, and realizing that the change has to be made on dozens of individual pages:(
9. Create individual titles for your pages. The “title” tag is one of the most important, from an SEO perspective.
10. Customize the meta content and keyword tags. This is important in that these are the tags that “describe” your page’s content to the seach engines.
These are just some of the search engine optimization techniques we use here at Freedom Florida. Contact us today for a free analysis of your website.
Tags: ad spend, apache, google, ppc, search engine, search engine optimization, seo, wordpress
I would like to take this opportunity to recognize the superb job that was done for Eagle Nest On-Line Academy. From start to finish the job has been not only professional but personable. It would be easy for me to recommend them to anyone seeking their expertise.
