So I’m ready to dust this bad boy off again. When I last wrote I was in my 7th week of a 12 week SEO internship. At the last day of the internship, my SEO mentor tells me he has bad news… “You have to come back to work on Monday.†My internship had been extended for an additional three months, and I was given two sites to work on. Each of the sites had an in-depth SEO audit from early 2008. I was let loose on the situation, and worked with the sites’ manager and developers to optimize them. I couldn’t have asked for a better circumstance to work under. I was able to work autonomously with tons of support from the people around the office, whether they were directly involved with the project or not. My internship ends again at the end of the year, and I’m pretty sure they’re serious this time. I learned a lot in that beginning SEO incubator, and I’d like to share some of it now.
Quality web site markup The way your site is built has a significant impact on bringing in search engine traffic, and helps you to keep your visitors around longer. Using web standards when you write your markup and site architecture, and content integration can help bring in boatloads of traffic and help your users find exactly what they’re looking for when they arrive. The appropriate use of web standards can significantly reduce development and maintenance time. One external CSS file can control the look of your entire site, eliminate the need for redundant HTML like <font> tags and allow you to make global style updates by changing just a few lines of code. Following web standards can also help to avoid the SEO mistake of duplicate content. For example, one XHTML file can employ separate style sheets for screen, print or mobile devices, removing the need for more than one document. Separating formatting, structure and behavior will speed up the loading time of your web site. all of the CSS or JavaScript used in your site is downloaded only once when your user downloads the page that includes them. Search engines will have an easier time crawling your site when they can avoid things like missing close tags, complex nested tables and invalid code. There are a few essential tags that should be used on every optimized page. <title> could be the most important place to place your primary keywords. Create titles using natural language, and avoid making them any longer than 60 characters. <strong> and <em> help search engines determine the hierarchical importance of a keyword, as in this example: The more credible sites that <em>link</em> to your site, the better your <strong>search engine results</strong> will be. <alt> Alternative or “alt†text is placed within an image’s XHTML to replace an image if it can not be rendered. Use keywords to describe what is shown in the image. Anchor text is the word or phrase a user clicks on in a link. Give your links’ anchor text some good, descriptive keywords.