I'm redesigning my companies website from the ground up and want to keep SEO in mind while doing so. I'm basically looking for go resource that will explain the finer points of having to designing a website with SEO in mind. It's been a long time since I've designed a website from scratch but I've never designed one with SEO in mind besides the most basic stuff like keeping stuff in header tags, having good site structure and making it content driven.
If you are using firefox, there is a plugin called SEOquake which shows you what you need for seo... Here is the preview what it shows..
Website design or its structure can do about 5% of all SEO. The rest 95% of SEO depends on your content. However, be sure your Page Title is optimized (for every page, not only Home page), meta description tag added (with 140-170 characters) and that you have matching h1-h6 structure. If you have an image header, you can use "a title" and "img alt" instead of "text-content" hack. The rest will do your content and quality backlinks building. Good luck!
Content, number of links pointing to your site and - the only thing you can control when designing the site - everything must be semantically correct. (IOW, using an h4 header without having it descend from h1, h2 and h3 headers will penalize you.) Not getting errors when validating isn't enough, if you don't understand how a site has to be written, learn or hire someone who does.
Thanks everyone. Is there any benefit is building the site using something like Wordpress? I've always just built my sites using HTML/CSS and good file structure. I've read in the past that Google favors site that feature fresh and frequently updated content so I assume updating the content frequently would be helpful. Is this true? Finally, this is a local business. Is there anything I could do to boost my local search results? I've already claimed my Google+ Local Business page and customized it.
Would a website be penalized if it featured multiple H1 tags on one page? For example, my company offers 3 primary services and if I created links and for each service (Service1, Service2, etc.) and each was contained in an H1 tag would Google penalize the site for this? Should links even be contained in Header tags?
No more than a book would be penalized for having 3 chapters. What's bad is starting with an h3, with no h1 and h2. Or having the tags out of order (h1 being a sub of h2 which is a sub of h3). H tags aren't used to change the size and weight of the text, they're used to tell things that read the code where section breaks occur. Having 3 equal weight sections (h1s) on a page is fine. As far as links in headers, h1- -----some text -----a link -----some other text h1- is fine. @irdesign3rs: In English, "a reading" means "by a psychic or fortune teller". I think you meant "you need to read". You can't create English just by translating each word in your language into the English word. What you create is words that seem to mean something but either don't, or they mean something other than what you meant them to say. And you certainly won't get web design jobs from American or English clients if you can't write colloquial English. The language on the site you design doesn't reflect on you, it reflects on your client - and he doesn't want his customers thinking that he can't speak English properly.
Search for SEOmoz and use their guidelines. May take you some time to read and fully understand the basics but at least they use very strict guidelines.