How to SEO Your Website Series – Part II – Coding and Programming

In Part I of this series we provided you with 16 tips to consider from an SEO perspective in the initial stages of building a website. In this article we will be outlining 6 important SEO tips from a coding perspective. The coding or programming is generally referred to as the “back end” of a website. Always keep in mind that what the search engine spiders feed off is the “back end” of a website. The search engines have no ability to measure your website based on its “front end”.

Some Basic Rules On How To SEO Your Website

By following some basic rules of coding and programming you will be able to prepare your site for better indexing when it goes online. The following are 6 valuable SEO coding and programming tips for your website:

1. When using Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.
2. It’s very important to have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site and if it’s indispensable to have the name of your company in it. We recommend putting it at the end.
3. Frames, AJAX and Flash all have one issue: you can’t link to a single page. Avoid using frames and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.
4. If you’re planning to have (or already have) a splash page as your main page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.
5. You should give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. It’s not good to optimize the page for several keywords at once.
6. Don’t forget to optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Make use of descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.If you have several web pages that are very similar and you want to be sure that the correct one is indexed with the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.

It is important to check your website’s server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved permanently” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.

Next article – Content

In our next article in this series we will be providing tips on building rich content for your website and how to effectively leverage the content for SEO value.