Learning SEO can seem like a daunting task. It doesn’t take long to realize there is a lot to learn, and it takes quite a bit of research to separate fact from fiction. Fortunately, you don’t have to become an expert to get results. You can build a solid foundation in about 30 minutes by focusing on these four factors:
1. Title tags
Optimizing your title tags is probably the single most effective, yet simplest part of your SEO efforts because:
- It helps the search engines see each page as unique content
- It’s where the click-able “headline” people see when using a search engine comes from
- It helps to influence the anchor text when people link to your web pages
- It carries a lot of weight in the algorithm that search engines use to determine where your page ranks
You can find your title tag within the HTML source code of each page, and it will look something like this:
<title>Your page title here...</title>
Your first step is to ensure that each page has a unique title, preferably beginning with relevant keyword phrases. If you must include your company name or tag line, it should appear after any other relevant information, but keep in mind that the search engines generally only index about the first 70 characters.
*Note: If you are using a content management system, you will need to modify your titles through your admin area.
Don’t go overboard with keyword phrases because it won’t help, and more importantly, people will be less likely to
2. Description tags
Along with your title tags, your description tags help the search engines to see each page as unique content while giving visitors a better idea of what they can expect to see when they click through.
You can find your title tag within the HTML source code of each page, and it will look something like this:
<meta name="description" content="Your description here..." />
To optimize your description tag, provide a brief (about 155 characters, or 25-30 words) description of the page, preferably containing relevant keyword phrases.
Note: As with your title tags, if you are using a content management system, you will need to modify your descriptions through your admin area.
3. Site map
The larger your website is, the more important your site map becomes. Although it doesn’t guarantee ranking, indexing or even crawling of your web pages, it does help search engines to easily find all of them, which makes it more likely.
If you’re using a content management system, there is likely either the functionality built in, or a free plug-in available to dynamically generate an updated site map any time you add, edit or delete content. If your website is coded in static HTML, you’ll have to use a service such as XML-Sitemaps.com to generate your site map.
4. Canonicalization
Canonicalization simply means transforming data that has more than one possible representation into a standard, or canonical form. As it relates to SEO, canonicalization means resolving the issue of multiple URLs for the same content because they can cause problems for search engines – specifically in determining which URL should be shown in search results. For example, all of these URLs point to the same page, but a search engine will only consider one of them to be the canonical form of the URL:
- www.example.com
- example.com/
- www.example.com/index.html
- example.com/home.php
You can fix your canonicalization issues by:
301 Redirect non-www to www , or vice versa
Edit (or create) your .htaccess file, using mod rewrite to either add the www to, or remove it from your domain.
To add the www:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} example\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
To remove the www:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} www.example\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Consistent linking practices
Your linking practices should utilize which ever version of your domain you chose to use (non-www or www)
Then ensure that your internal linking structure is uniform by linking to pages in the same manner throughout your entire website. Check the link to your home page throughout your site – is index.html (or something similar, such as index.asp, index.php, etc.) appended to your domain name? If so, get rid of it. You should also make sure that any forum, e-commerce or other software running on your site uses SEO-friendly links rather than session IDs because they may cause search engines to believe that there are several versions of the same content on your website.
Standardize internal linking structure
