SEO - the essentials

Much of SEO is common sense once you worked your way through the blind alleyways and misleading jargon - at least until the next time the big search engines change the way they find you. This short post provides a list of SEO essentials which should improve your website rankings when they are all put together. Hopefully, much of this will still apply in a couple of years or so.

1. Avoid association with blacklisted IP addresses - Overall trust in your site is extremely important, so spend some time in making sure you are not associated with problem servers and hosts, and put in time to make sure your site is not hacked and so becomes an unwitting propagator of illicit material.
2. Take account of geographical place - If you are a US business, it pays to use a dotcom. In the UK, a .co.uk domain does the same thing. Both help to associate the site with their geographical location.
3. Tags - Each page should have unique title tags, meta descriptions and keywords. As the basic building blocks of SEO, they act as the headlines of your site and help bring focus on to your keywords. 
4. Good content - Your key pages should have around 350 words of indexable content. Text still ranks the highest, and if you lack content, how do you expect the search engines to associate your site with the keywords that are so important.
5. Categorise well - Keep important content no more than two steps away from the homepage. If your content is well set out and well categorised, it will make it easier for the search engines to find them and to index them as well.
6. Use the correct HTML hierarchy - H1,H2,H3 settings and so on. These help to determine the relative importance of keywords on the site.
7. Make your pages Search Engine Friendly - Clean URL's with keywords aid your search rankings. It will also ensure you avoid duplicate instances of the type suggested when you arrive on a home page with the www/mysite/index or www.mysite.default.aspx as its title.
8. Keep CSS and Javascript externally - for the same reason, this means there is less code to load and pages will work faster.
9. Keep site navigation in HTML - With so many tempting Javascript and Flash menus out there, you can forget that these will hamper the way search engines find the site.
10. Limit Flash - In particular avoid Flash navigation and pure Flash content as te Search Engines are not easily able to index the content. HTML5 can give you many of the same effects and is search engine friendly.
11. Avoid iFrames - The content of an iFrame will not be properly associated with your site and so should be used sparingly, if at all.
12. Use breadcrumbs if appropriate - they provide extra links, and add to the usability and hierarchy of the site.
13. Avoid duplicate pages - Just because the development process allows this, search engines are looking for unique content. By definition, duplicates reduce value, and so may limit keyword rankings.
    
14. Keep page load light - They will load faster, which appeals to people and to search engines alike. It also means you pay respect to the people who don't have high speed connection because of where they are located at that moment.
15. Image alt tags - Use them to help the search engines link your pictures to keywords and content.
16. Include sitemaps  - The site should have both HTML and  XML site-maps. They help with indexing. The XML map should be submitted to webmaster tools.
17. Include a robots.txt file - The robots.txt file tells search engines which pages you want to be indexed and which you do not. Exercise caution as restricting the wrong pages can damage the site.
18. Google and Bing Webmaster tools - These should be installed as they will help you keep tabs on the performance of your site and the way the search engines view them.
19. Google analytics - use the new asynchronous Analytics code to increase page speed. You can find this at Google asynchronous Analytics link.
20. 404 pages - Have a well designed 404 page, so that if a link does break down, the 404 page is no longer a dead end, but provides links back to the site to allow your users to get back on track

 Depending on how much time you have, you can use this as a checklist to managing your own SEO. Optimising a website can, of course, apply to many elements, and can become very detailed. But if you don't start by getting the basics right, all that money thrown at PPC will be so much more wasted.