Organic SEO Building a Search Engine Friendly Website

Here are some essentials for building a search engine optimized, SEO website.

SEF URL’s

Also known as permalinks. SEF (search engine friendly) URL’s mean having readable, relevant address for your content. If you’re using WordPress or Joomla, this means converting those URL’s to SEF URL’s via some sort of plugin or conversion component. If you are developing your site in html with, let’s say Dreamweaver, this means naming your URL’s appropriate to the content.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you write an article about organic fertilizer. Name the URL likewise www.yoursite.com/how_to_make_organic_fertilizer This is a a search engine friendly URL. This is not www.yoursite.com/index.php?option=com_plugins&client. Skip the gibberish URL’s for better rankings.

Don’t Forget Meta Data

Every content page in your site should have have the proper meta data included. Meta data are items that search engines use to crawl and index content on your site. The typical meta data fields that are most important to SEO include Title, Description and Keywords. For the best SEO rankings make sure your meta data is in line with your pages content, and is not excessive and focused on a few targeted key words.

You Need A Sitemap

Sitemaps are a tool that search engine robots use to crawl your site. Basically there are maps of what you want them to include in their search engines. If you don’t include pages in your sitemap, chances are they won’t show in searches. I use XML Sitemaps for HTML sites and Jcrawler Joomla sites. With HTML sites you’ll need to submit your sitemap to google, bing, yahoo, moreover and ask. With Jcrawler you can just click the nifty submit button.

.htaccess An SEO Life Saver

This document can be a life saver when moving a site. Basically it sits on your server and gives access and direction to search engines. Why I call it a life saver. Well, you’ll want to use this if for some reason your change your URLs. So, lets say you redesign your website and move all your content without regard to your current URLs. Now the same article “How to Make Organic Fertilizer” is at www.yoursite.com/making_organic_fertilizer when it was at www.yoursite.com/how_to__make_organic_fertilizer. Big problem. Google will consider this duplicate content and eventually kick the content out of it’s search results. Use the .htaccess to redirect your old URLs to your new URL’s and protect your content’s rankings like this: Redirect 301 /how_to__make_organic_fertilizer http://www.yoursite.com/making_organic_fertilizer

Link Depth Structure

Watch your link depth structure for your most important pages. Sitemaps place importance to where pages are located on a site. They give highest priority to links on the first page, less for secondary links and so on. If a page on your site is critical to your SEO you’ll want to make sure it lands on the first or second level for optimized exposure.

Watch Your Content

Duplicate content can happen due to bad SEF execution, moving a site or even moving content to another section. The result is often being banished from search engine results. If you notice a sudden drop in your SEO. Go back and examine indexed content, crawl errors, sitemap errors or robot errors until you find the culprit. Often duplicate content mishaps show up here.

I won’t say enjoy but I will say good luck!

Fran Jacoberger is a NY web design & marketing agency.  To learn more visit franjacoberger.com