10 Crucial SEO Factors For Your Website

This article aims to outline the top factors to consider when building your website to ensure you maximise your chances of ranking well in search engines. This is not a definitive map to SEO success, but it aims to be a non-technical guide for business owners to consider when they are building their website. If you are contracting a third party to build your website, this list can provide a suitable starting point for your SEO strategy.

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1. Domain Name

Your domain name can have a massive effect on how your site ranks in search engines. If you already have a business name you will obviously want to use this in the domain name. But you should also include keywords where necessary as this will improve your rankings within search engines. For example, if your company is called Orc Garden and you sell blue widgets you could just use www.orc-garden.co.uk as your domain. However, from an SEO perspective, www.orc-garden-blue-widgets.co.uk is much more beneficial as it provides details of the products you sell.

2. Page URL's

It’s important that your individual page URL’s are unique, descriptive and use relevant keywords where necessary. Many websites use page URL’s that are non-descriptive, such as www.orc-garden-blue-widgets.co.uk/index.php?234&p23 which are meaningless for SEO. Instead you should be aiming to use URL’s such as www.orc-garden-blue-widgets.co.uk/large-blue-widgets. As well as being beneficial for SEO, it also provides the end user with a friendlier URL.

3. Page titles and descriptions

Page titles appear at the top of the browser window when you view a page. These should be unique for each page on your site and contain relevant keywords, although not too many. Try to make them as descriptive as possible and ensure you update them if you update your content to allow for new keywords. Page descriptions appear on search engine results pages under your page’s title. Again, they should be as descriptive as possible and contain keywords.

4. Missing pages

Everyone has clicked on a link at some point only to be presented with a ‘Page Not Found’ error, also known as a 404 page. Not only are these irritating to the end user but search engines don’t like them either. Most website servers log errors so you should monitor these errors to see if 404’s are occurring on your site. If they are you need to find out why and fix the problem. Additionally, you should consider using a custom 404 page which will keep users on your site by redirecting them to alternative pages.

5. External links

One of the biggest factors to consider for SEO are inbound links where external websites link through to your site. A site that has lots of other sites linking to it will be trusted much more by search engines than a site with few or no external links. Blogs, website directories, partner sites and client sites are a great way to promote your website, so leave a link to your page wherever you can. DO NOT buy links, search engines are very good at identifying this behaviour and your ranking will suffer as a result.

6. Content

Make sure your content is accurate, relevant and customer focused. Keywords in your content are crucial, but you should always write content for humans and not for search engines. Content should be logically structured and coded correctly. You should also ensure you are constantly refreshing your content. A website where content doesn’t change for months on end will soon drop down the rankings. News items, new products and blogs are a great way to create new content so the search engines can see that your site is active.

7. Keywords

Keywords are crucial to getting your website to rank highly. You should identify which keywords you are going to target as early as possible and make sure each page is optimised for those keywords. There are free tools out there to help with this, or use an SEO specialist to identify which keywords will work for you. Also, make sure your web developer optimises your site during the development process by adding in relevant meta information on each page.

8. Social networking

Social networking is now a crucial marketing tool for many companies and is a key method for driving traffic to websites. You can use channels such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn to stay in touch with your customers, announce promotions and market new products. Not all channels will suit all organisations so it’s important to identify which networks will work for you and how you will communicate your message.

9. Competitors

Keeping an eye on your competitors is vital if you want to stay one step ahead. Monitoring how your rivals are ranking for particular keywords, what they are bidding on for PPC and which SEO techniques they are using will give you a competitive advantage. You can react to market changes, identify new customer bases and see what your competitors are doing right, and what they are doing wrong!!

10. Monitor

Monitoring your site is absolutely vital if you want to succeed. Google Webmaster and Analytics are a good start, but if you really want to succeed you should be monitoring a whole lot more – how you rank for keywords over a given period of time, how your competition are ranking, which pages are working and which are not. SEO is not a one off task, it needs constant care and attention.