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At the last count there were around 8 billion webpages being visited by approximately 1 billion users. Most of these websites depend on search engines for regular flow of visitors. No wonder Search Engine Optimization is the hottest thing in the market. Generally it is assumed that SEO is the responsibility of Webmasters, Marketing Consultants or an SEO expert, developers need not worry about SEO issues. It was bit surprising for me to learn that while SEO experts are responsible for optimizing the website to get included in SERPs, ignoring certain optimization guidelines during development can seriously undermine optimization efforts later on. In fact, some of these issues if left unresolved may get the site banned from search engine crawlers.

Following are some basic tips I found from different websites that should be followed during web development even after presuming that the development process does not involve actual content creation but creation of a skeletal framework only.

Keywords

The first step in creating a Search Engine Optimized web page would be identifying keywords that the search engine should associate with the page. For instance if the website belongs to a florist and the page contains information on roses, the ideal keyword would be "flowers", "roses." These keywords will play major role in the structuring of the page but that's for the content developer to worry about, so let's not go into details. What matters to us is that we should be able to recognize words that most accurately reflect what information the particular page is providing to the user. (Note: Keywords mentioned here should not be confused with the Meta tag, Keywords, included in the head section of the page)

Meta Tag

Meta tags are perhaps the oldest SEO technique and the most exploited one. Every web page should have different Meta tags in the head section. Meta tags are used in the form of a key/value pair in the "head" section of the html page.

Include a description tag and a keyword tag with relevant values only. The description tag should appropriately describe the content of the particular page. While Google requires a description Meta tag to be less than 100 characters, Open Directory fixes the upper limit at 30 characters. Keywords tag is where you put words and phrases that you want the page to be associated with. The maximum size of this value can be fixed to around 250-300 characters, multiple phrases can be used by using comma (,) as the separator but the phrase or word has to be present in the main body of the page. Besides, you also need to make sure that the words are not repeated in the value of Meta tags.

The Meta tag has been the most misused SEO technique (Black Hat SEO) by spammers and as a result search engine crawlers now look at keywords rather suspiciously. There is a great deal of ambiguity on whether search engines continue to value keyword Meta tags or not. Google, for one, may have deprecated the use of keyword tags but the same cannot be held true for all other search engines. So adding appropriate keywords shouldn't really harm your chances as long as the tag doesn't contain anything which may be seen by search engine crawlers as spam, which in turn would adversely influence the position of your page in SERPs.

Title

After Meta tags, we proceed to the title of the page. Often titles of web pages are found to be ambiguous or consisting of a generic set of words which may offer general or not information on the site rather than the page in question. The most common title I have come across is "Untitled" and believe it or not according to Google there are around 37,900,000 web pages titled "untitled" ! A more SEO-friendly approach would require the title to reflect the content of the page appropriately and in as few words as possible. Adding relevant keyword to the title would help optimization but stuffing keywords in title would be considered as spam by bots. Besides this there are some additional rules to be kept in mind while titling a webpage. The maximum characters you can use in the title is 100 characters (including white spaces) but some search engines limit it to 60 characters. The title should be different from both domain name and file name, it is considered as spam.

Head

While going through webpages most of us do pay importance to headings to determine if the content following them are relevant enough. Search engines too follow a similar approach and highly value the text included in the heading tag. Heading tags should be used to include keywords that best describe the content that follow them. You can use more than one head tag in a page but make sure that all of them are relevant to the content of the page.

<h1>Roses</h1>

….

<!-head 1 section

<h2>Tulips</h2>

…..

<!-head 2 section

Besides these, there are a few more SEO guidelines that should be kept in mind while creating a wepage :

Use keywords in all pages but they should be relevant and not overused.

Keywords should be used in the beginning of the page.

The content should have at least 250 words but the size should not exceed 100 kb.

Include keywords in the ALT tag of images.

Include JavaScript and CSS in external files

Provide a human readable sitemap.

The above guidelines are what you should follow for SE Optimization but what follows next are practices you should avoid.

Do not include irrelevant keywords. (Words or phrases not present in the text)

Do not stuff keywords.

Do not use an all JavaScript or Flash navigation without an html alternative.

Do not use hidden text or links.

Avoid using dynamic URL unless required by essential functionalities.

Before signing off I should mention that, while the human visitor may be impressed with your graphics and multimedia rich site most search bots don't even see them. So including keywords in images or flash files instead of plain text would be a counter-productive approach. To find out how a search bot sees the site, you can view it in a text-based browser like Lynx an online version of which can be found here

Note: While optimizing a webpage always remember the inscription in the wall of the Temple of Apollo in Delphi -

Meden gan -- "Nothing in excess"

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Author: Danish Ahmed

Web Development

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