We wanted to share with you a little more about our general and specific processes regarding search engine optimization, particularly because Google says to never trust a search engine optimizer who won’t explain their methods. (Not that we don’t have a few trade secrets!)
Stage one analysis includes (but isn’t limited to):
Meta Data
- Picking the right keywords for every page, doing a deep dive statistical analysis on search volume, competition, and relevance of a word to your page.
- The same for your pages title, and the uniqueness, within a site, of the title.
- Usage of “alt” tags for all images and “title” tags for anchors
- The length of your meta description, it’s appearance on the search engines, phrasing, and inclusion of keywords and words listed on the same page.
Content Analysis – Some of this does appear during the design phase if you have Jacob Tyler create your site.
- Internal Linking Structure
- Where are links on a page?
- What are they linking to?
- Other pages on your site
- External linking for helpful sites or authority sources
- What is the link text?
- Spelling
- Grammar
- Four clicks or less to get to anything on the site
- Call to action
- Presentation and layout
- Use of heading text, structure, and page placement
- Use of bold, underlined, and italicized text and their placement on a page
Our in depth Search Engine Optimization service is primarily concerned with many other things including (but not exclusively) the following:
Standards:
- Page Doctype specification
- W3C Standards Compliance to newest technologies available
- Error free JavaScript
- Error free CSS
- Error free XHTML
Domain Setup
- URL structure
- Is your URL even right for you?
- Should you use a personalized nameserver
Architecture & Server Setup
- Where JavaScript and CSS files are included in a page
- Various kinds of page and file compression methods
- Apache Configuration
- Use of 404 error pages
- Internal redirection
- Server requests and lookups
- Number of documents on a site
- Number of files on a page
- Page load times
- Use of a Content Delivery Network service to reduce network hops
- A few other tricks up our sleeve…
Machine Informative
- Usage of robots.txt for search engines, dynamic where applicable
- Dynamic (where applicable) XML Sitemaps
Security – Because we’re digging into the nitty gritty anyway…
- Hiding the site’s underlying technology – techniques such as removing the “.html” or the “.php” from the user agent
- Hiding the CMS platform (when one is used) from the user agent
Better SEO Article 3 of 3
-jb