As a leading SEO company review site we felt, with the launch of our new blog, that we should help in educating potential SEO clients in some of the most important and effective aspects of SEO. So, should you decide to sign up with an SEO company, you’ll know some of the key areas that you’d expect to be addressed on your website.
We have been in touch with some of the industry’s leading SEOs and website developers and compiled this information into a short list of changes anyone can implement onto their own website for the highest impact within the search engines with minimal amount of effort. It goes without saying that these areas should be taken into consideration when developing a website from the ground up if you’re to create an efficient website able to benefit from search engine traffic.
Title Tag
This was overwhelmingly the top response by most of the developers. Many of them specifically mentioned building dynamic title tags, and not just hand coding each page.
Canonical URL Tag
Multiple people mentioned the canonical URL tag. In the SEO world many people got very excited when this tag came out and it’s great to know that it has surfaced as an important feature for developers as well.
Permalinks
Get your URLs right! For many years now developers have built dynamic URLs that were not user friendly at all. There are so many options to rewrite and redirect your URLs and many CMS’s are getting more and more SEO savvy.
Robots.txt
Although the robots.txt file is there to help a site owner make sure that the right areas are being crawled, if it set up incorrectly it could do more damage than it’s worth. The idea for creating a robots.txt file that works for your SEO is to make sure that you don’t have “Disallow: /” or are in some way blocking access to relevant areas of the site that really should be indexed.
Image Alt Attribute
This is a big one. There has been extension research and discussion in the SEO world that keyword rich (non-spammy) image alt attributes correlate with higher rankings.
These days web developers – even website designers – live on the same planet as SEOs and realise that for a website to be successful it needs to have certain SEO traits built into it. These days a good website isn’t enough anymore. SEO needs to be an integral part of the website and its foundations, even if at the most basic level.
A good website with good SEO foundations leaves room to further optimise the website easily without having to fork out for time- and money-intensive redevelopment, leaving you funds to put into your marketing and search engine optimisation.
Also worth noting, but didn’t make the top 5 list, were dynamic meta tags, internal linking, valid X(HTML), URL Hierarchy and fixing bad navigation.
