George Rosier's portfolio & blog site

Here’s a hopefully quite well-rounded and all-encompassing-yet-succinct guide to all that SEO and web usability stuff you keep reading about but would like to see in one place.

In this 2-part thingy I’ll be covering the following topics at a high level:

1. Links (equity, inbound link importance, writing/colours/format/titles/targets, link buying)
2. Headings (H1, H2, sizes, colours, keywords)
3. Content (relevancy, not keyword stuffed, writing for people)
4. Imagery (relevancy, contrasts, copy-as-images, alt tags)
5. Flash (why/why not, navigation)
6. Technical (301 redirects, non-www domains, keywords in domain names, mod-rewrite for search friendly pages, meta content)

So, without further ado, here are the first 3: read on…

Links

Link equity:

My definition of ‘Link equity’: a term that describes how much value (in terms of appearing in SERPs) a page or site has. A page or site with lots of link equity is important because search engines think it has value for a given keyword. Google’s PageRank indicator can give an indication of it’s value (between 1 and 10).

Inbound link importance:

1. If you want your site to rank better for certain keywords, the best way of doing so is to gain inbound links from good quality sites. By ‘good quality’, I mean authoritative and legit. A link in to your site from the BBC for example would be invaluable.
2. The way to get the best out of an authoritative site linking to you is to try and ensure that link is descriptive: ‘Click here to visit George’s site‘ is less valuable than a well-written link, like ‘Visit Planet Anarky, George’s blog on web usability and SEO‘. More on link writing in the next section.
3. Don’t spam blog comments with links and/or comments; most of the time, they’ll automatically tag your links with ‘rel=nofollow‘, rendering them useless in terms of link building (the ‘nofollow’ tag tells search engines not to follow the link).
4. The only exception to #3 is if you’re actually contributing useful info on a busy blog: you can still generate visits from other interested readers, even if you don’t get any benefit from search engines.

Link writing:

When writing links, try and follow these rules:

1. Don’t use ‘Click here’ as your link text. It means nothing, and your internal link structure will suffer.
2. Instead, use descriptive links where possible, such as ‘Read more of our SEO guide‘
3. Where possible, follow web convention for link decoration: links should be a different colour to regular body text
4. The default link colour is blue – but brand guidelines and the rest of the site colour scheme may prevent this being used.
5. A link may also be underlined to indicate it’s a link – though this blog relies purely on the blue colouring.
6. Don’t ever underline text for emphasis – use the <em> tag for that.
7. Make sure the ‘visited’ link colour is different from the unvisited link colour.
8. If the link sends the user somewhere in your site, don’t specify a target in the HTML; if it sends them out to another site, target should =’_blank‘ (so it opens in a new window).
9. Use ‘<a title=‘ to give your links good descriptions, and if possible state whether it’ll open in a new window.

Link buying:

Refers to the practice of paying for inbound links. Google will penalise sites found to be doing this. There’s debate around whether you should just bite the bullet and buy some links if you want to get results in the short term…but generally speaking it’s best to stay on the right side of the search engines and stick to nice, natural, ethical link building. It takes time, but it’s safer.

Headings

Using H1, H2 etc:

Page heading/titles should use the larger <h1> tag, and subsections should use <h2> – and further subsections should use <h3> – and so on.  Visual hierarchy is key; it helps your visitors differentiate between new sections.

Heading colours:

Can be whatever you like, really.

Headings with keywords:

There’s (some) evidence to suggest that a good descriptive H1/H2 tag with a keyword in it is valued more by search engines than regular paragraph text. Use this to your advantage – but don’t abuse it by stuffing your page H1′s with keywords. Write your content so it’s written for people, not search engines. More on this next.

Content

Relevancy:

This will be succinct as as you can get: If you have well-written original content that is relevant to whatever you’re selling, search engines will like it and you’ll be more likely to appear in the SERPs. Simple.

Secondary to that: if you have this great and relevant content, other sites will be more likely to link to you.

Not keyword-stuffed:

Search engines are savvy to bollocks content that’s stuffed with stupid keywords. Don’t do it; it just puts off people who actually end up reading the content, and singles you out as a spammy scammer.

Optimised for people:

Quite simple: make sure you write your content so it’s Optimised To Be Interesting For People.

That concludes part 1: part 2 coming soon.