Search-Engine-Friendly Design and Development Basics[1]

Sometimes it’s a good idea to review the basics — whether it’s SEO or watercolor painting.  I remember when I was finishing up my art school courses at School of Visual Arts, and decided to take a drawing class at my local night school. I learned as much there as I had in college.  Below, you’ll see what I’ve condensed from SEO authority, Seomoz.  And whether you’re an SEO pro or new to the whole idea of search engine optimization, I hope you’ll either learn from or get refreshed by these handy guidelines.

Indexing

HTML is good. Flash is bad.

By using tools like Google’s
cache, SEO-browser.com, the MozBar or Yellowpipe you can see what elements of
your content are visible and indexable to the engines.

According to Seomoz, they
have “a nifty tool called ‘Term Extractor’ that will display words and
phrases ordered by frequency.”

Keyword Density and Page
Optimization

Contrary to popular belief,
keyword usage and targeting are only a small part of the search engines’
ranking algorithms according to SEOMOZ. 
However, they recommend that you:

·     
Place your keyword close
to the beginning of text.

·     
Use the keyword at least
once in the

o    
Title tag

o    
H1 header tag of the
page

o    
alt attribute of an
image

o    
meta description tag

o    
URL

·     
In the body copy, use it
at least 3X, bold it at least once.

Experts agree that the title
tag is the most important place to use keywords to achieve high rankings
(afterall, it is the summary of the site that comes up in search).

Keep your most important copy to 70 characters or less, as
that is all that shows on the page.

The meta description tag serves the function of advertising
copy, drawing readers to your site from the results and thus, is an extremely
important part of search marketing. Crafting a readable, compelling description
using important keywords (notice how Google “bolds” the searched
keywords in the description) can draw a much higher click-through rate of
searchers to your page.

Give each page unique copy. If that’s not possible, say you
have text and a PDF download of that text on the same page,  you can use a “301” redirect
in the PDF’s URL. Alternatively, you can do a “Canonical URL tag” in
the HTML description of the page.  You’ll have to look up what canonical means for yourself 🙂