Best Practice SEO Web Design Standards 2011

SEO is all about precision. For the most part I look at SEO like an orchestra, sure, each instrument can be played on their own, but the more you get better at optimizing your content, technical code and link building, the greater the impact. All of the SEO elements work together to frame the focus of the page, improving the SEO rankings.

This post is about the Best Practice SEO Web Design Standards. I would like to profusely thank Ania Franczak from Performance Media who has given me permission to publish her findings in this post. Below are the SEO standards to follow when designing or redesigning a website.

Highly Recommended Standards

● Do not use flash as one object containing a site, provide alternative HTML content with ‘progressive enhancement methodology’.

● Use JavaScript as an enhancement to the basic, fully functional HTML page.

● Enhance page only for capable browsers.

● Do not use session ids and dynamic parameters in URLs.

● Do not use frames.

● Do not create duplicate content.

● Create & maintain a site map for users and a separate compliant Google XML sitemap and submit it to the Google Webmaster Tools (and other search engine tools)

● Link to the user site map from every page.

● Keep URLs short; use keywords in URLs; keep URLs in local language.

● Limit number of directory levels to 2 or less.

● Page weight (in KB) should be as small as possible

● Optimize page opening time. Use Page Speed browser extension and Page Speed Online

● Use hosting and web analytics reporting solutions – Urchin, Google Analytics, Omniture, Webtrends, or Unica (you can use any depending upon your budget. Note – Google Analytics is a free tool. Rest all are paid tools)

● Plan SEO-compliant migration for redesign - use 301(permanent) redirects not 302 (temporary) redirect, use 404 response code for not existing pages and 503 response code when site is temporarily unavailable

● Use country in top level domain names, e.g. rediff.co.in, yahoo.co.uk. except for the US then use .com. Do not combine countries in one site.

● If the website needs to be mainly in Flash, make sure it is SEO-compliant using Progressive Enhancement providing alternative HTML content

● The best way to develop a site using rich content (Flash, JavaScript/Ajax, CSS) is to build it as a basic (safe) HTML site and enable rich content with Progressive Enhancement methodology

● Test cookies to ensure they do not limit Search Engine crawler access.

● Ensure robots.txt file allows Search Engine crawlers into website.

● Use Google Webmaster Tools to monitor problems encountered by search engine robot

Recommended Standards

● Create a preferred landing page (PLP) with relevant content for each of your GOLD keywords.

● Do not create microsites, unless the purpose is or is part of an SEO strategy.

● Use keywords in title tags.

● Build unique and descriptive titles up to 70 characters.

● Hide database driven site details from URLs.

● Do not use subdomains for new content on a site, use subdirectories instead.

● Use keywords in body text, use keywords in header tags (especially in H1 tag)

● Use keywords in meta descriptions, use keywords in image alt tags

● Limit number of directory levels to 3 or less

● Emphasize keywords with bold (stron tag) & italics (em tag)

● Create a 12 month refresh plan to update the site

● Ensure country selectors are search friendly ( allow crawlers into website) and safe (don’t allow crawlers to index content from another locale)

● Place important content closer to the site root and prevents spiders from seeing duplicate content. (use 301 redirects, meta robots tag/robots.txt file and rel=”canonical” tag)

● Use a CMS that allows SEO modifications to dramatically reduce SEM costs.

Failure to comply with these standards will result in poor search engine rankings & inability to remedy the issue without expensive, time-consuming, & unplanned re-work.