SEO Step By Step: Part 1 - Getting Started

Posted by Seth Bracewell on Friday Feb 17, 2012 9:24 pm

Square zero. A lonely place to be for a new company or anyone looking to break through and get noticed on the web. Having just launched my own web design and marketing company after flying under the radar for quite some time I though it would be fitting to begin this blog with the topic of search engine optimization, or SEO. The idea being to track every step in detail along the way. We will also chart progress in terms of measurable indicators which will be listed at the bottom of each blog entry periodically in this series.

Having been in the web software programming field in one way or another for the past 15 years, I've seen a lot of change in the industry, but one thing that has become abundantly evident is that search engines, particularly Google, have redefined the way we buy products, recreate, travel, communicate and generally live our lives. This is obviously old news, but the point is, how do we do business based on a new paradigm of behaviour?

In many ways the internet has leveled the playing field for businesses. A professional web presence can allow the proverbial garage startup to compete effectively with established businesses as customers will judge a company more and more on their website. If your site portrays a level of professional credibility, communicates your message clearly and effectively, and guides the user experience properly,  a customer will be willing to give you a try.

So, come with me as I take this journey from nowhere to hopefully somewhere. Everything I'm going to do here I've done for my clients, but for the first time I'll document every step of the way.

The Basics

Before submitting your site to Google, Bing or any of the search engines or directories, it's a good idea to cover the basics of on-site optimization. Google offers a great guide to get you started. These include:

  • Search Engine Friendly URLs - You'll notice as you navigate through this site that the URLs match the page content pretty closely. For example our Portfolio page can be found at http://www.sarasotawebdesignllc.com/portfolio. Google like this. If you have a lot of query strings in your URL (e.g. http://www.mysite.com/index.php?page_id=364&uID=32) it will be much harder to get indexed effectively.
  • Distinct, descriptive page titles - Not a fun task, but vital in getting your pages indexed. Our platform makes it easy to supply meta titles for your pages.
  • Meta Description & Keywords - Lately Google is shying away from using meta description for indexing and listing, but it is still used by other search engines and is useful in keeping you site organized and on-message.
  • 301 Redirect - If your site can be accessed with or without a leading 'www', you should do a redirect so it is recognized as the same site by search engines. If you look up in the address bar right now you will see that the URL begins with http://www.sarasotawebdesignllc.com. Try removing the 'www' (so it begins with http://sarasotawebdesignllc.com) and see what happens.
  • Optimize Your Images - Essentially this means providing descriptive 'alt' tags. If your image tags match the message of your site, that's good!
  • Use Heading Tags (h1, h2, etc) effectively - Heading tags should be hierarchical in nature (higher numbers nested underneath lower) and try to stick with only one h1 tag per page.
  • Check your site for W3C Compliance - A useful tool can be found here to check your site for errors. Fix as many as you can. I've just completed a check for this site and have eliminated all errors. For more details please review this report.
  • Create worthwhile content - Google's goal is to deliver the best results for the search terms entered. Their search algorithms are sophisticated to the point that any attempt to game the system with keyword stuffing or misleading content will likely get you blacklisted.
  • Install Visitor Tracking Tools - Go with Google Analytics.

All done? Great!! Next we submit our site to the search engines.

Current Site Metrics

Google Page Rank 0/10
Site Visitors 0

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