Traffic Generation Primer

These are my top tips for creating a site code structure that is very effective with Google and others, from an SEO perspective.
Its really important to NOT overkill on keywords on a page!
Be sensible when naming items and adding text to ALT tags and other tags.

Roles – Who Does What?

If this website represents your business, then YOU should do the research and know your market place, website competition, keywords and so on. Do not pass this off to your webmaster!

This knowledge will help you then brief your webmaster so that they can then interpret your marketing needs and make sure all the following elements are correctly coded.

Content and Pages:

A website needs to have many pages with unique content (text that can be read) to be taken seriously by the search engines.

Keyword Research:

Start by using GOOGLEs external keyword research tool to find the most relevant keywords for a site.
When creating home page and key external links to the site, construct sentences and phrases using these keywords

Webmaster Tools:

Set up in Google, Bing and Yahoo webmaster tools with validation META tags added to header.
XML site maps should be submitted to webmaster accounts.

Title Tags:

Every page must have a unique non-empty TITLE tag. Every page must be different
No more than 12 words.

Meta Description:

The page description should describe, briefly, what the page is all about.
Construct sentences careful to use appropriate keywords – but don’t lie about the page and don’t overkill on keywords.
2 snappy sentences at most.

Meta Keywords:

Use the most relevant sets of keywords from your keyword research.

Keep this to about 15-20 unique words

H1 and H2:

The Home Page H1 is best set the same as the TITLE tag or close to it.
H2 Tags also give search engines great clues about a page content.

The H1 tag should be close the beginning of the page top code as possible.
The CSS can ‘display’ the H1 tag anywhere on the page

Anchor Text in Text Links

The anchor text in a text link should reflect the keywords and the content of the target page.

Site Maps:

All sites should have site XML site maps submitted to Webmaster tools

The robots.txt file should have an entry that points to the site map

Images:

Images should have ALT tags filled in – don’t leave ALT tags as ” ” (blank)

If an image has a particular meaning on a page (for example the house this page is all about) then its worthwhile adding a TITLE to the IMG tag too.

This should apply to property images, agent images etc.

Internal Linking:

Its very important to create many internal cross-referencing links on lots of pages within a site.

Best way to start to do this is a text link footer menu.

But text on pages should have links to other pages too.

Footer links back to home page:

Always have a full “http://YOUR-URL” address link with the keywords on it going back to the index page, on every page footer

Long Tail URLs

If possible – the URLS should contain the keywords relevant to the page in the page name