Monday, January 25, 2010

Website Design Checklist IV - Structure

1. Does your website have a robots.txt file that correctly limits the access of search engine robots to say login, search results pages etc. Have you checked the robots.txt file using Google Webmaster Tools. Ensure that any pages you do not want index have the meta tag noindex.
2. How often do you update the website content? Try to update at least a part of the website on a weekly basis, diary this to ensure weeks do not pass without the website’s content being updated.
3. How many pages are there on your website, the more pages of useful updated content the better. Visitors and search engines robots will keep coming back for more.
4. Have you constructed a sitemap and submitted it to Google via Webmaster Tools. Check with Webmaster Tools that there are no problems with the sitemap and remedy any errors.
5. Does your website have either a search facility or, a user as opposed to search engine, sitemap?
6. Is it easy for visitors to contact you, do you have full contact details on your website offering a number of options eg online form, direct email, telephone number, address etc. Remember that all businesses in the UK are obliged to provide full contact details on their website. Providing contact details will help you appear in local searches.
7. If necessary does your website have details of your privacy policy, terms and conditions of business etc.
8. Does your website have testimonials from clients, examples of your work etc to increease visitor trust.
9. Check that you are not duplicating the same content over several pages of your website, if so remove it, and check that you do not have multiple urls pointing to the same page.
10. Check your website’s page loading time under labs in Webmaster Tools, if it is too slow take measures to decrease the load speed by compressing images, CSS etc and using gzip compression if allowed by your server.
11. Look at the popularity of your website pages, not just the home page. If there are few links to inner pages try and build links to those pages.
12. Ensure that your website has links to any social media websites you participate in for example, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and have icons that allow individual pages to be notified to Digg or saved as bookmarks etc.

There are other posts on this blog and our main SEO4all website dealing with many of these issues.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Web Design Checklist III - Content

Content

  1. Content should be UNIQUE, useful and grammatically correct.
  2. Amount of content - at the barest minumum you need to have at least 300 words per page.
  3. If you have a lot of textual messages in graphics do you have a textual equivalent? Search engines and screen readers for people with sight problems cannot read the words within graphics.
  4. Do all graphics have alt and title attributes completed with useful descriptions but with no keyword stuffing.
  5. Ensure content is updated to take into account any seasonality in searches.
  6. Avoid using stop words where more useful words (possibly keywords) can be used instead.
  7. Ensure your content contains the types of phrases that people searching for your type of product might put into a search engine.
  8. As Google has now introduced its Answer Highlighting ensure that your website's content includes the types of questions searchers may put into search engines AND the answer.
  9. Check your website's content regularly to ensure a hacker has not inserted text or links.
  10. Do not have hidden content.
  11. Do not overuse keywords, no one keyword should have a density of more than 8% of the page. Use Webmaster Tools to see which words occur most frequently on your website and if these are not the words you wish then rewrite your copy.

Web Design Checklist II - Website Architecture

Website Architecture

When constructing your website bear in mind the following points and check your website out to ensure it complies with all disability requirements and that it is constructed well so that it renders well in different browsers and is easily indexed by search engines.
  1. URL structure - do the urls use sessionids etc or are they search engine friendly, see Search Engine Friendly URLs;
  2. HTML structure - make sure pages are constructed using divs not tables. Tables are only used now for tabulated data. Do not use frames, avoid using Flash etc, see Search Engine Friendly Websites;
  3. Use external CSS and JS files;
  4. Navigation - is it the same on every page and is it clear. Every page on your website should be no more than 2 clicks from the home page.
  5. Website accessibility - test your website so that it complies with all disability and accessibilty requirements, see SEO Tools;
  6. Use of rel=canonical, see Using rel=canonical;
  7. Coding, check your HTML and CSS is compliant, see Website Tools;

Web Design Checklist I - Domains

Choosing Your Domain

1. Domain age - older domains have more credence as spamming websites are normally short-lived so older more longstanding domains are indexed better. Likewise if there is less than a year left until you need to re-register the domain consider renewing it immediately;
2. Domain registration information hidden/anonymous - serious businesses would not leave their information hidden to the public;
3. Type of domain - in this country you will find that .co.uk domains are indexed faster than .com so unless you have an international business buy a .co.uk domain.;
4. Domain past owners - if you are buying a “second hand” domain check very carefully as to how many previous owners there have been, how often did the owner change, where was the domain hosted, what business was carried out on the domain. You do not want your website to gain the poor reputation of a business previously hosted on the domain.
5. Keywords in the domain - try and have at least one keyword in the domain, separate any words using hyphens as search engines will see the domain as being made up of separate words as opposed to one long meaningless string. If you do use hyphens avoid having more than 1 or 2 in the domain name.