I still have to come up with a good title..

I’ve been asked by a fellow coworker to give an eye to a site, and help optimizing it as to reach global search engine presence (or domination, if you allow me).

Tricky area, the website is about an hotel in a very turistic zone of italy, and even the name of the firm has to stand ground against competitors.
The main idea when I was contacted was to improve the ranking of the pages, increasing the chances of visitors clicking through, falling in love with the site, purchasing a long lasting idyllic holyday, and finally paying sweet dinero with which to feed the capitalistic inner greed of everybody involved with which to make everybody live a life freed by economic worries, contemplating the beauty of the Italian beaches while sipping a coconut flavored drink in the shadows of a palm tree (the famous palm trees that surround the zone of Venice).

I compiled a list of basic free techniques and good practices that could help these guys doing so. Nothing original, a nice crop and chop from different authors, with different experiences.
Even if I don’t expect it to be a sort of “magic checklist”, I find them useful info, and for sure there will be some webdeveloper out there that will make good use of it.

So, here we go!

• Keywords METATAG..!

Metatags. Different people has different opinions about how relevant they are for spiders in the SEO process.
What is commonly agreed throughout my sources, however, is that the keywords metatag is a good way to start, as it’s free and easy to implement, and as it helps search engines to focus on the content of your site.
As it will be seen, keywords are going to be used in various contexts, such as meta tags, title tags of pages, keyword-rich content, URLs of pages, image names tags, keyword-rich description metatags etc.
Their importance however must not be pushed, as an excessive amount of words can be read by spiders as an attempt of spamming, labeled as “keyword-stuffing”.

• Description METATAG..!

Among the major search engines, often the data used in the description metatag is used as the site’s description in the search results. For this reason it is very important that the tag provides an appealing descriptive summary of the site to attract visitors.
Beware the risk of being too wordy, as some search engines may truncate descriptions after X characters.

• Title tag..!

Apparently the title tag and the page header are the two most important spots where to put keywords.
When crawling a page, the title tag is given the greatest weight of any other single element.
For this reason it is an important occasion to use an unique keyword-focused text, that reflects the content of the page.
Changing page title across the site to include content focused keywords can in fact greatly increase the chances of a page being indexed with a strong ranking when quering for those keywords.
If you MUST have the name of your company in the title of the pages, place it at the end of it. Unless you are a major brand, in fact, the keywords will generate more traffic to the site than the brand itself.

• Create a sitemap..!

Adding a sitemap makes it easier for spiders to crawl all the pages that compose your site. There are lots of online tools and plugins out there that can help you with this task, according to the structure and nature of your site.

• Search-friendly URLs..!

Self explanatory point. Keyword-rich URLs will have a higher chance of getting a strong ranking when those words reflect the query. Static URLs are preferred over dynamic URLs. The reason being the usage of non-standard characters like ?, &, %,=  by dynamic indexing.
Many times everything after those characters is disregarded, so any URL that is seen this way by a search engine is going to be read as nothing more than a list of duplicate homepage URLs.

• Image descriptions..!

Spiders and robots can only crawl through text, not text in images: Use the alt tags of images to include keyword-rich descriptions of every image on the site.
Alt tags make also the site more accessible to visually impaired people using text readers.
Even if the website is already content rich, the alt tags allow for reinforcement of keyword density, increasing the chances of good indexing.
Using keyword-rich text captions as descriptions near the images is also a good practice.

• Content is king..!

The content on the site needs to be fresh, updated regurarly, and it is often crucial for increasing traffic.
Good, well written unique content that focuses on a primary keyword or on a primary phrase will increase the chances of both good indexing and visitor satisfaction.
Search engines want natural language content: They look at how many times a term is used in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count against you rather than for you. (keyword-stuffing, ring any bell?)
You must remember to include both unique content AND quality content.
“The best sites for users, and consequently for search engines, are full of updated, useful information about a given service, product, topic or discipline” — said a certain dude.
Content freshness adds relevance to the site in the eyes of Search Engines.
One way to ensure that the site gets new content on a frequent basis is to integrate a blog.
“An executive blog is an excellent way to reach out to your clients, create more opportunities for internal and external linking, while giving your site a more personal voice.” — said my mama.

• Internal links..!

A very basic strategy for SEO is the integration of internal links into the site: Links to other pages of the same site are a good practice, for example linking visitors back to archive pages, boosting traffic and improving the bounce rate.
It’s important to keep these anchor text search-engine friendly. A “SEO tips” text link is preferred over a generic link “click here“-like one. Also the text around the anchor is important. Surround the links with relevant descriptions.
“The more relevant words point to a page, the more likely that page is to appear in search results when users run a query with those terms.”

• External links..!

An easy way to direct more traffic to your site is by developing relationships with other sites. These relationships can generate external links for both sites, a win-win situation.
When link building, however, think quality and not quantity.
You must ensure to be part of a network of quality backlinks (there must be a logical reason for that link to link with you), as doing otherwise (linking to link farms or other bad neighbourhoods) can affect your site adversely.

• Viral components..!

Add viral components to your website or blog — reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.
Understand and make use of social marketing. It IS part of SEO.

• Web Standards..!

Using semantically correct XHTML and CSS markup is one key to search engine optimization.
Frames, CGI scripts, image maps, dynamically generated pages, Flash and Ajax can cause problems to the search engine spiders.
..and what if I want a Flash splash screen as first page..? If you really have to do that, make sure at least to place hidden text and navigation links below the splashy thingy. You can have them invisible to the eyes of the visitor, while still being phisically present as HTML, allowing for crawling by spiders.

• New site..?

Submitting a new site through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks to get it spidered. The quickest way to get your site crawled by robots is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

Well, this will be enough to get me started crosschecking with what they did on that site. It’s the first time that I work with SEO (or at least, the first time that I’m doing it seriously), so it’s going to be a good learning experience.

Enjoy!

Sources, among others:

The Business Insider – 10 basic SEO tips to get your started
Search Engine Journal – 55 quick SEO tips even your mother would love
Perfect Optimization – Image ALT tags optimization
Market Position – SEO for images
Fiercestreet Networks – Search Engine Optimization tips

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