Website Developer’s SEO Page Formatting Guide
SEO Page Formatting
As a website developer, there are some guidelines that you should stick to. I am going to outline the most basic elements of SEO below - It’s a long document, so give yourself around 10 minutes to read it.
Read On…
Website TITLE Tag:
Your website TITLE tag is the second most important SEO element after your domain name.Your website’s title tag should be at least 30, but no more than 70 characters. This is because Google & other search engines truncate the title at 70 characters OR the last complete word before 70 characters is reached.
A guideline on how title should be formatted is as follows:
SEO HTML Title Tag Examples:
Home Page:
<title>Website Theme In 5 Words | Website Name</title>Category / Taxonomy Page:
<title>Sub category < Category | Website Name</title>Product Page / Top Page:
<title>Product Name < Category | Website Name</title>
Website Description Tag:
Some people suggest that Google & other search engines ignore your website page’s DESCRIPTION meta tag. This is simply NOT true! - Google & other search engines will look at the meta Description to try to assess the page’s topic before comparing it to the content of it’s <h1> and <p> tags, which I will cover later in this document.
Your website meta description should be 2 full sentences with a capital letter at the start and a full stop at the end. You should write your description as if you were talking to a Human Being, however, keep in mind that you should ensure that your target keyphrases are in the first sentence.
SEO Meta Description Tag Example:
<meta name=”description” content=”Using Search Engine Optimisation to choosing a good title for your website homepage. Six steps to a successful title for your website homepage.”>
The above example came from this website: Kanga Internet
Website Keywords:
On this subject I will agree that Google & most other search engines do completely ignore the keywords meta tag. However I must stress that website directories and some of the smaller search engines DO use it. Therefore it’s still worth having included in your pages.
Keywords tags should be made up of phrases of no more than 4 words, separated by a comma but no space and use plural phrases where possible - as people tend to search by plural keyphrases, such as “sheds” or “bathrooms”.
SEO Meta Description Tag Example:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”tagret keyphrase,keywords,keyword targeted”>
HTML Page Content Tags:
The four main content tags are as follows: <h1>, <h2>, <h3> & <p>. Some people also use <h4> but i only use that for product page sub titles. None the less all of the four above are VERY important and equaly as important is their order and page placement.
Example of HTML tag order:
<h1>Article Title</h1>
<p>Paragraph describing the article, or an intruductory paragraph.</p><h2>Article Sub Title</h2>
<p>Another paragraph, part of the article</p>
As you can see, the <h1> tag comes first, then a <p>, followed by a <h2> tag, then another <p> etc. There is also two other tags to talk about…
<strong>target keyphrase</strong>
A paragraph html tag is very important as Google & other search engines read the <p> tags (as well as everything else) to determine the theme and subject of a page. If you emphasise a certain target keyphrase, then a search engine will pick up on this and gives more weight to that phrase than the rest of the sentence. Use this technique sparingly and only once per sentence otherwise a search engine will probably asume it to be spam
Example? Re-read the paragraph above.
Page Links:
Inbound links are what transfer weight from your home page to your internal pages and visa-versa. But how is this weight transfered? The answer is with what is referred to as keywords & anchor text (The same rule applies to incoming links - which I will do an article on at a later date).
<a href=”/electronics/tv/index.html” title=”sony tv”>Sony TVs</a>
As you can see from the short example above of an internal category link, we are linking to a page called “Sony TVs” and therefore we use the words “Sony TVs” as the link text. We also have a TITLE attribute to our link tag, which we will also place the keyphrase “sony tv”.
This will give that page weight as it now has an incomming link with the anchor text, telling a search engine, before it even get’s to the page, what the page theme will be.
URL Link Format:
Your url should also represent the theme of the page and what is on the page. You should also try and follow your category heirachy as much as possible. For example, the path to a paroduct may be:
Electronics > TVs > Plasma TVs > Sony XYZ Plasma Screen
In this instance the page urls would have been:
http://www.yourshopdomain.com/electronics/
http://www.yourshopdomain.com/electronics/tv/
http://www.yourshopdomain.com/electroncis/tv/plasma-tv/
http://www.yourshopdomain.com/electroncis/tv/plasma-tv/sony-xyz-plasma-tv.html
And, inkeeping with the TITLE tag guidelines above the meta titles would have been:
Electronics | Your Shop Name
TVs < Electronics | Your Shop Name
Plasma TVs < TVs < Electronics | Your Shop Name
Sony XYZ Plasma TV < Plasma TVs < TVs < Electronics | Your Shop Name
This may be getting a little complicated but, there is one more rule that I design websites by:
Only ever go 3 directory/category/taxonomy/hierarchical levels deep otherwise a search engine **might** not travel that deep into your website. I have no facts to back this up, it’s just my oppinion, but you would have to have a HUGE website to need any more than 3 category levels.
Page File Size:
There is a great deal of debate on this subject however, it is well known and documented that Google & some other search engines give more weight to prominence, therefore the first <p> tag on the page has more authority than the second, and so on.
Therefore it stands to reason that page size is a factor in search engine rankings. For example, if your page is 200K and has 20 <p> tags then the page is “diluted” when it comes to keyphrase density.
However, a 100K page with 20 internal links and 1 <h1> tag, 2 <p> tags is heavily concentrated therefore my prominence, proximity and density rule applies.
I would advise an HTML page size no larger than 150Kb (before CSS style sheets & images).
Finally, I have found a great PDF on SEOmoz which covers most of what I have written above, but on a handy pritable PDF. Feel free to download it. - Click here
June 4th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
da best. Keep it going! Thank you.
June 13th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Hi, very nice post. I have been wondering bout this issue, so thanks for posting.
June 15th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Varying the anchor text in backlinks is a vital thing to do, making the text fit in in as natural a way as is humanely possible. I often see people using unnatural anchor text in their links and it would stick out like a sore thumb to Google et al in my opinion. The text has to be in context and read naturally to humans.