SEO – Search Engine Optimization, has become an essential tool for web businesses as a key source of traffic and building your website or blog. PPC tactics are no longer sustainable or cost effective for promoting services and increasing traffic. A solid understanding of SEO is critical in today’s online business world.

SEO simply means building your site’s value in the calculations of search engines like Google. Having a healthy number of links from your site to other sources is one way of building value into your website, but there are many factors that can improve your site’s SEO.

Here are some ways to perfect your website for search engines:

Optimize your content – One of the most obvious, and most often overlooked aspects of creating a high-quality website is to make sure the actual content on your site is good. The recent Google Panda update has put increasing focus on the relevancy and quality of original content on websites. Make sure all your content is original, and each page contains around 150 words of text. Next, check your copy reflects the terms you are trying to rank for. Key word rich copy is a great way of telling Google what you want to be ranking for. The copy should also be correctly formatted with a single H1 tag reinforcing your primary key term for that page. You can then have multiple H2 and H3 tags if needed. The content also needs a good image to text ratio.

Get rid of duplicate content – Make sure there are no canonical issues on your site by telling Google what the master URL of each page is. Duplicate content is a killer, and all content on your site should be hand written, even the generic and product descriptive text. Sites with supplicate content will struggle to rank.

Accessibility – Are there rules in the robots.txt file blocking pages from being indexed by Google? Also ensure your site is usable and the text is in place with CSS, JavaScript and the images all off.

Site Architecture – The hierarchy of the site should be geared so power can be filtered down effectively. Landing pages and key category pages must be as “near” to the homepage as possible. There should not be any pages on the site that are more than 5 clicks away from the homepage. Navigation should also be well thought through in terms of pages being found.

Technical Issues – Make sure there are no 301 redirects internally throughout your site. JavaScript allows you to present content in attractive ways, but ensure it is not hiding the text from Google. iFrames can be used if it is completely necessary to source generic copy that cannot be rewritten. It is worth remembering that content inside a Flash application cannot be read by Google. In terms of other technical issues, the web page loading times should be under 2 seconds and this can be achieved by compressing text and imagery and minimizing the HTML code.

Titles & Meta – Page titles should reflect key terms and the primary key term for each page should be right at the beginning. A page title should be no more than 70 characters. Keep your brand or website name at the end of all the titles so there are no duplicate title issues. Ensure you have an effective meta description for your site with a strong call to action to get users to click on, also make sure each page’s meta description is unique and original.

Steve is a professional SEO Engineer, representing clients such as Vanquis Bank ltd. He believes a well-built website is the best foundation before a link building campaign.