SEO Website Design Guidelines
April 5th, 2008 BernieWhat I love about this industry is that anyone with knowledge can become an authority. For SEO website design guidelines, listen to what Chuck has to say. Below the video is a far less entertaining summary…
Directory structure: Use a shallow directory. Keep the most important webpages on the root.
Flash Alternative: Provide an alternative text version of the content used in Flash.
Robots.txt: We should be able to upload/modify robots.txt file.
Sitemap guidelines:
1) Site should have an XML Sitemap for Google stats tracking (not for users), e.g.,http://www.khameleonsoftware.com/sitemap.xml
2) Should have an editable site map for user navigation and search crawlers, e.g., http://www.findandconvert.com/site-map.html/
1.No underscores – use hyphens instead.
2.No special characters
3.Should be able to use keywords in URL structure – should be independent of Webpage title tag, Page Name etc.
E.g., http://www.findandconvert.com/link-building.html/
No session ids – use cookies.
Embedded CSS: CSS should not be embedded on the webpage.
IP based content delivery: Don’t deliver content based on IP detection.
Avoid a deep directory structure so engines can crawl the site easily.
Dynamic URLS: If pages are being generated dynamically, avoid too many parameters (special characters) in the URL
Java Scripts: Call all java scripts externally from a separate .JS file. Don’t embed them in the code.
Images guidelins:
1. The site design should not be made with extensive image usage. Search engines cannot read text embedded in images. There should be no use of any splash page or graphic intensive home page
2. Should be able to upload images
3. Should be able to edit image names
4. Should be able to add alt text
5. Should be able to add title attributes (if hyperlinked)
1. Should be able to give heading tags to content (H1 – H6), bold, italics, underlines, etc.
2. Title attributes to hyperlinked text
Footer Text navigation is a must.
Meta Tags: Should be able to add/edit Title tags and meta tags (keywords tag, description tag, abstract tag etc).
Validate HTML: Should validate your website using w3c validator.
Redirects: If at all the site needs to use a redirect while programming, make use of 301 redirects. There should be no use of any 302 redirects at all.
