As we are in danger of getting too technical,
we will not spend too long on this section, but hopefully we can provide enough
ammunition to ask some questions of your chosen SEO expert:
● Hierarchy: your navigation flow should be
logical. By this we mean that each level of your structure should sit logically
below the previous level. For example, a page on your website that promotes
ballpoint pens should sit underneath a page on pens, which should in turn sit
under a page on stationery so that there is a logical path for a user to follow
to effectively filter their way down to their destination. In other words, make
sure your hierarchy uses some common sense. Figure 5.4 Tags Title Tag Sticky
eyes: Digital Marketing & SEO Agency Based in Leeds ... www.stickyeyes.com/
We’re a digital marketing agency that thrives on providing award-winning online
marketing through SEO, PPC & the full digital package. Meta Description 100
Digital Marketing Strategy
● URL structure: search engines use
‘robots’ to interpret sites. If your URL looks something like this – www.mysite.com/categorypage.
asp?prodId=1274234 – then you are not helping the robot to work out what
your site offers. The ideal is: www.mysite.com/Stationery/
Paper/A3_Paper/Economy_A3_paper.html.
● Site maps: create two – one for users and
one for search engines. The search-engine-friendly one should be an XML site
map file, which can also be submitted through Google’s Webmaster Tools (see
below).
●
Provide alt text for images. In the HTML you can assign ‘alt attributes’ to
help search engines interpret visual content.
● Avoid overusing Flash as it cannot always
be read and therefore hinders the discovery process.
● Avoid duplicate content. Note that this
means not reusing copy on other pages of your site, as well as ‘borrowing’
others’ content. Google will penalise a site that uses a lot of duplicate
content, so it is best avoided. If you cannot avoid duplicate content, do some
research on ‘301 redirects’ and the ‘rel=‘canonical’ attribute’.
● Webmaster Tools: make sure someone in
your organisation knows how to navigate Webmaster Tools (a Google-provided
platform). Webmaster Tools help in a number of areas and are quite powerful. It
is therefore also quite dangerous in the wrong hands, so proceed with caution.
A summary of the main functionality available within Webmaster Tools is as
follows: –
Shows crawl errors: this is useful as a
site with a lot of errors is unlikely to rank highly. – Allows submission of an
XML site map. –
Allows for modification of the robots.txt
files (which can be used to remove URLs already crawled by Googlebot). –
Identify issues with title and description
meta tags. –
Provide a high-level view of the top
searches used to reach your site. –
Remove unwanted site links that Google may
use in results. –
Receive notification of quality guideline
violations –
Request a site reconsideration following a
penalty.
The danger mentioned above arises from the
fact that these functions could enable someone to cause serious SEO issues to
your site such as deleting Search Engine Optimization 101 your robots.txt file,
uploading an incorrect site map or simply not being aware of serious SEO issues
with the site
