(upbeat music)
- Truthfully, SEO is an ongoing effort.
There isn't one specific tactic you can implement
at the start to succeed at the race.
It'll require many factors to be evaluated,
tweaked, and then refined.
With that said, there's still a handful of variables
that are absolutely essential to your success.
I'm going to focus on these key areas for now
to give you a foundation for your continued effort.
So first off, search engines are built
around their ability to index pages.
So it's very important
that your site is accessible to crawlers
and that crawlers can get to every page on your site.
Search engines love text,
it's the easiest for them to parse.
If you're using images in replace of text,
then you too will have a problem.
Search engines love clicking links.
If you've got your links
tucked into a custom JavaScript navigation,
well, your crawlability might be impaired.
So as you look to your site,
make sure you have at least one regular text-based hyperlink
to every page throughout your site.
And it's usually best to build a flat site hierarchy
versus a deep site hierarchy.
To help understand this, let's look at a flat hierarchy.
Here, you can see our homepage at the top.
And then the links that we have on our homepage
are represented by the second line of pages.
These might be things like About Us, Services,
Locations, and Contact.
If we had, for example, multiple locations,
we would place those under the locations page
and create a unique page for each one.
A deep structure looks more like this.
As you can see,
some content is very deep within the site.
This means a user has to click more times
to arrive at the same content.
And this also means that Google has to travel
further through the site in order to index that content.
And the further that Google goes,
well, the less value it's applying to each page,
it simply sees them as less important.
One other thing to pay attention to is siloed content.
In this site map, you'll see that we have a page
and it's sub pages are off to the side.
Here, there's no direct link from the homepage
or any page for that matter to get to that content.
This suggests to Google, if it could even find it,
that it's not important at all.
There are some exceptions to every rule.
In certain situations, there's simply too many categories
to show them all at one level.
In other cases, showing specific topics too soon
will just confuse your user,
and users will understand your offerings much better,
if you include some intermediate category pages
to help establish context.
Focus on building a site
that is easy to navigate for your users
with your most important content
linked clearly and prominently.
Next, be sure to look at how your URLs are named.
It's a great idea to have natural language URLs
free of any extensions.
If you have an e-commerce site,
a URL of clothingsite.com/mens/pants/denimjeans
is going to be much better
than clothing site.com/productid=1237ac
You get the idea?
Along that same concept,
be sure your title tags are unique to each individual page
and they include a clear topic.
Don't start your title tags with your domain name.
Simply put that at the end.
Be sure each page has a unique meta description.
Google often uses the meta description as the short text
that is visible in search results.
Don't just list keywords here.
Create a meaningful sentence or two
that will entice the visitor to click.
Next, make sure you're taking advantage of heading tags.
These are the h1, h2, and h3 tags.
You always want your heading tags
to appear in order on your page,
and you should only always have one heading one tag.
Avoid using your heading one tag to say things
like About Us, or Contact Us.
Instead, focus on the core topic for that page.
Check that every image on your website
has a well-defined name and an alt tag description.
No need to keyword stuff in these tags.
Just make them natural and relevant to the user
and Google will reward you.
Finally, be sure to use a site map,
both in HTML and XML format,
along with a well-defined robots.txt file.
I really recommend that you sign up
for Google Webmaster Tools.
It's a great resource that will help you inspect
the overall SEO health of your site.
You'll find the free signup at google.com/webmasters.
Use that dashboard to review
how many pages have been crawled and indexed,
see a list of crawl errors,
and identify any HTML improvements
Google recommends for you.
If you have a moderately sized site, check out the tool
Screaming Frog SEO Spider at screamingfrog.co.uk.
You can crawl your site just as a search engine would,
see a list of any broken links,
along with an output of all your heading one tags,
meta descriptions, and title tags.
Work through each page on your site
to make sure it's technically sound.
(upbeat music)