SEO is a pretty important aspect to consider when designing a web page. In fact I consider it to be the most important aspect. For a beginner it can be hard to find accurate information on the best methods to optimise your webpages so here’s the basic SEO methods I use when designing and building a site. It’s geared towards WordPress as that’s my CMS of choice and search engines are very familiar with scraping it which makes it a good SEO headstart.
SEO Ready Permalinks
Permalinks are the URL structure of your site. Setting this up properly allows you to add keywords into your URL. You can do this in your WordPress admin by going to Settings > Permalinks. There are a number of options but I suggest clicking “Custom Structure” and adding in:
/%postname%/
This will add your post titles into your URL and allow you to add SEO keywords to it. You can add other elements to it such as the date or the post id but make sure that your post name is in there too!
Meta Title
This is the most important tag on the whole page. Search engines weigh your keywords in here a whole lot more than any other element. There are some do’s and don’ts for this. Do build your theme in a way that will allow a user to use an SEO plugin to customise it for different posts. Don’t use a static description and even more important: Don’t make it the site name!
Meta Description
Your meta description has no weight on your SEO. What it does is gives Google a short description of the page to go underneath the link to your post on their search page. This should not be static. You should either build it to be handled with an SEO plugin or leave it out. “Leave it out?!” you say, “You must be crazy!” But think of it like this, Google knows when it’s scraping a WordPress site. It gets a little grumpy when it sees a static description, but when it doesn’t exist it takes a look into the body copy and pulls the description out of that. So as long as you have your keywords in your copy Google will find a relevant bit of text to go into that spot.
Meta Keywords
These don’t really have any effect but the general consensus is that they can’t hurt. Some SEO “experts” will tell you that your competition will look at this to easily see what keywords you use but I think they’re just being paranoid.
Logo
A bit mistake that a lot of theme designers make with this is by putting the site name in a heading 1 tag and then use CSS Image replacement to add in the image of the logo. Do not do this. Heading 1 tags are for your page titles, if you put the site name/logo in a h1 then search engines see that as the most important heading on the page and every page has the exact same heading! Instead do it like this:
<div id="logo">SITE NAME</div>
And use your CSS image replacement. This will give your page a more semantic structure. And actually here’s a quick note on:
CSS Image Replacement
This is totally acceptable if for example you want to use images for your navigation. What CSS replacement allows us to do is write up semantic html then make it look shinier by replacing the text with images in CSS. Search engines will then be able to read the text in the links and the users get some nice buttons. Just don’t use it to stuff your markup with keywords or you’ll get penalised. And so onto another quick note on:
Navigation
Search engines use your navigation to find out site structure so make it as easy for the robots to scrape as possible. Be careful about using Javascript on it as it might make it hard for them to read.
Breadcrumbs
When building a theme you should add in support for a breadcrumbs plugin. Breadcrumbs are crucial for the internal linking on your site and help both users and search engines know where they are in relation to the homepage. You should also make sure that your categories, tags and other taxonomies are well named and include your keywords.
Page Heading
Every page should have a h1 tag. This is the second most important element on your page after the meta title. You should put your main keywords in here. Don’t make them too long though, I try to keep mine to less than 10 words.
Images
I like to use a featured image for posts and pages in my WordPress themes then display them in a nice prominent way on the page. It is important when adding these images to put a caption with your keywords into the alt tag on the image. You can do this when uploading the picture in the admin panel. Some people like to load the alt tag with keywords but this is not good practice and will end up getting you penalised.
Post Links
When linking to posts you should use the post title as the text for the link. Just the text will do if the list is in the sidebar but if it is a WordPress archive page you should add the excerpt too so each post has a description. Also when linking to the full post you should put the post title as the first link. If you want to have a read more button add it as a second link to the post and place it after the excerpt.
Sidebar
Your sidebar should always come after the body content in you site code. If you need to place it to the left of the content use CSS floating to achieve it. Remember, search engines rate the content closes to the top of the source as the most important content on your pages.
Content
This is pretty self explanatory. If you are writing about a topic you need to make sure you use the right keywords the right amount in the post content. This is called keyword density. Basically it’s the percentage amount your chosen keywords are used compared to the rest of the content. It should be over 1% but I try and go for around 3-4%.
Dynamic Content
As mentioned before, be careful with dynamic content. Search engines aren’t able to crawl Flash or content loaded with javascript so this won’t be picked up. A huge mistake people make is having a flash site with no alternative for search engines. Plus the content won’t load on an iPhone!
Semantic Code
And lastly, you need to keep your code as clean as possible. A nice light semantic page with no errors will make it much easier for your content to get crawled and found.
Clean code makes Google a happy, happy, hippopotamus.
Abban Dunne – 2011.
Lastly, lastly, remember these are only starting guidelines. SEO goes much deeper than just structuring your web pages correctly but this will give you a good start. If your WordPress theme follows these instructions and doesn’t make any of the obvious mistakes then I reckon you could definitely label it as an SEO ready theme. If you’re looking for a good plugin to handle some of the extra SEO functionality I highly recommend the WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast.
If you have any suggestions or updates please leave them in the comments below.
Comments
Hey.
Thanks for this article. The Plugin by Yoast is indeed nice. I do wonder however you deal with keywords that are long. ?
Lets say that your keyword is “How to make a great post on abandon”. And you write an article for 200 words. Then it is pretty impossible to keep using this keyword without having an annoying text.
Thanks
Well, “How to make a great post on Abandon” isn’t a keyword. Say if you were writing a blog post about writing blog posts then you would fill it with keywords applicable to that.