Lemon Foundation

If you’re wondering how you can rise up the Search Engine rankings, without doing anything dodgy, then you should definitely give this a read on the train tonight.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a dark art to most, if not an exacting science to others, so whether you’re on the agency side offering SEO services to your clients or you’re an the client side trying to figure out how you can maximize your SEO, there are always things that can be learnt which will aid and abet you!

One of the fundamentals is planning, where the age old adage still applies today – if you fail to plan, you plan to fail – yet many people still underestimate how important this process is.  It needs to be thought of from before any design and implementation starts, and it needs to be implemented while things are being coded – leaving it as an afterthought is not a great idea and will most certainly result in more stress.

Another thing a lot of people underestimate is how important it is to target key phrases that your potential customers are likely to search for – as an example, “media industry desktop support services, Farringdon, London” is probably a better bet than “desktop support London”.

Another point many people forget, is to make your title tags in your links meaningful – and to make them correspond with the key phrases that are specific to your business / web site.  So instead of a link on your home page that has a title of “Desktop support”, make the title look like “media industry desktop support services, Farringdon, London”.  Similarly, do the same for images and any other non-text elements on your pages.

Perhaps the easiest thing to do if you know how is to use structured markup that separates content from structure from presentation and from business logic.  If you combine that with a sitemap, your site should be easily digestible for the search engines, and should be giving suitable relevance to headings and links within your pages.

Dynamic URL’s are definitely something that you should endeavor to avoid – anything that looks like gibberish in your URL (like: http://your-domain.com/products/viewproduct.aspx?item_id=14&cat_id=12&subcat_id=24B8-1000849@@@@&section=586&origin=google&cookie=false), especially if there are more than three query string parameters, should be avoided at all costs.  They tend to be ignored by search engines and result in poor search engine crawling, which in turn is bad for natural search and return on investment.  If you can, make sure that your URL’s are rewritten in plain English so that the above query string problem is taken care of, and if possible, architect your content up front so that there aren’t too many levels of information that could overload the search engine.

The above points are absolutely not definitive, but do highlight some basic measures that can be taken to maximize what you’re already doing, and should provide you with a bit of background when speaking to vendors about your needs.  If you'd like to look into things a bit more comprehensively, then read the The Ultimate eSEO Checklist

Happy optimizing!