Published on Dec 7, 2011
Title tags: The title element of a page is meant to be an accurate, concise description of a page’s content. It is critical to both user experience and search engine optimization.
Meta description: The meta description tag acts as a short description of a page’s content. Search engines do not use the keywords or phrases in this tag for rankings, but meta descriptions are the primary source for the snippet of text displayed beneath a listing in the results.
Proper URL structure: URLs, the web address for a particular document, are of great value from a search perspective, and they appear in multiple important locations.
A few best practices:
- URLs should be appropriately descriptive of a page’s content.
- Shorter is better
- Keyword use is important (but overuse can be dangerous)
- Avoid parameters (symbols and characters like &, _, =, etc.)
- Choose descriptives whenever possible over numbers or meaningless figures
- Use hyphens to separate words (but not in the main homepage URL of a site)
301 redirects: Used to avoid duplicate content issues with search engines by telling them that multiple pages should be considered as one.
Image/alt tags: Images in gif, jpg, or png format can be assigned “alt attributes” in HTML, providing search engines a text description of the visual content.
Heading tags (H1, H2, etc.): Heading tags are an HTML tags that are used to structure websites. Headings should contain keywords, with the most important keywords included in the first level (H1). For best SEO practices, use only one H1 title per page.
Schema tags (microdata): A schema tag is a technical semantic markup that can be used to better structure the data submitted to search engines.
Robots.txt file: The Robots.txt file allows you to instruct search engine robots on how to crawl and index pages on their website. It can prevent these robots from accessing specific directories and pages, and it also specifies where the XML sitemap file is located.
Sitemap.xml file: A sitemap lists URLs that are available for crawling and can include additional information such as last update, frequency of changes, and importance. The sitemap allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently.
Link building: For search engines that crawl the web, links are the streets between pages. Using link analysis, the engines can discover how pages are related to other pages and in what ways. Due to such heavy focus on algorithmic use and analysis of links, growing the link profile of a website is critical to gaining traction, attention, and traffic from search engines. For SEOs, link building is among the top tasks required for search ranking and traffic success.
Content optimization: One of the most effective tools SEOs have to work with, “content” is loosely defined as all things on-page, and includes titles, tags, text, in-site links and out-bound links. Content optimization is where creative art gets mixed into the webmaster science of SEO.
Looking for a more in-depth tutorial on the mysteries of SEO? Check out the SEOmoz Beginner’s Guide to SEO, which covers everything from how search engines work to the fundamental strategies you’ll need to make your website rank well in organic searches.
