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Hi Everyone,
I recently had an inquiry from someone who was looking for some possible SEO consulting with me. He was in the process of a redesign and wanted to be sure not to make any mistakes along the way, which is super-smart! The time to be looking at SEO is definitely in the beginning stage of any design or redesign project.
The interesting part of the email was this person's misconceptions about what he thought were important factors for the search engines. I'd like to share those points with you, with my comments following each one :
1. Little or no Flash
2. All scripts should be called from external files
3. The site should be designed using CSS as extensively as possible
4. The CSS should be called from external files
5. There should be no comments in the code. It should be added to an FAQ or Doc-type file
6. A large percentage of the code on each page needs to change from page to page so that the search engines don't see the pages as duplicate content
7. All picture links should have text links under the pictures
8. DO NOT use drop-down or fly-out menus using JavaScript
9. Must use basic HTML link navigation (textual navigation, no JavaScript mouse-over, and no image map graphical navigation)
10. All pages must be VALIDATED by an HTML validator and all style sheets need to be VALIDATED through a CSS validator
11. The majority of the site will be static, as static pages are easier for search engines to crawl and rank properly
12. The site needs to be browser-compatible and screen-resolution-compatible
I recently had an inquiry from someone who was looking for some possible SEO consulting with me. He was in the process of a redesign and wanted to be sure not to make any mistakes along the way, which is super-smart! The time to be looking at SEO is definitely in the beginning stage of any design or redesign project.
The interesting part of the email was this person's misconceptions about what he thought were important factors for the search engines. I'd like to share those points with you, with my comments following each one :
1. Little or no Flash
2. All scripts should be called from external files
3. The site should be designed using CSS as extensively as possible
4. The CSS should be called from external files
5. There should be no comments in the code. It should be added to an FAQ or Doc-type file
6. A large percentage of the code on each page needs to change from page to page so that the search engines don't see the pages as duplicate content
7. All picture links should have text links under the pictures
8. DO NOT use drop-down or fly-out menus using JavaScript
9. Must use basic HTML link navigation (textual navigation, no JavaScript mouse-over, and no image map graphical navigation)
10. All pages must be VALIDATED by an HTML validator and all style sheets need to be VALIDATED through a CSS validator
11. The majority of the site will be static, as static pages are easier for search engines to crawl and rank properly
12. The site needs to be browser-compatible and screen-resolution-compatible