KISSing Up To SEO

When planning your website with SEO in mind, you have to think about more than the optimization of the content. The best brands of SEO consider everything from the content to the loading speed of pages to how easy, or difficult, it is for your site to be crawled. It isn’t always easy or practical for all website owners to implement the many pieces that comprise a good SEO website, particularly if they are trying to overhaul an older site, but for webmasters launching a new website, here are some key targets to focus on.

Something few people consider all that seriously when they are laying out what they want their website designer to create is crawlability. Crawlers, or spiders if you prefer, access and read content on a page in order to index it. If a crawler, or spider, has insufficient content to crawl the page or site will not be indexed. Not being indexed pretty much means your site is dead in the water. Unless you are building a site for fun or your own personal warehousing of whatever it is you want stored, the ability to be crawled with few crawl page errors, if any, and you want your pages indexed.

Content hierarchy is yet another aspect of how a website is managed that often goes unnoticed. What this basically refers to is making sure that you have the type of content people who come to your site are looking for – and you are presenting it in a manner that is easy to find and interact with. Focus on what keywords people use to find your site when you begin planning your content hierarchy. More common search terms that lead back to you deserve a greater focus. Also try to avoid placing links inside of media applications like Silverlight or Flash.

Keep It Simple Stupid! – at least when it comes to on-page factors regarding your site. K.I.S.S. is an acronym that survives in all facets of life because it is almost always accurate – the simple solution is often the best. In regards to optimizing your site, what does it mean? It means don’t get overly fancy with your tags, titles and things of that nature. Titles should be short and sweet consisting of no more than around 65 characters. Each title should be unique to the page and contain your main keyword. The content should be unique. Tags are good and they do carry some value, but don’t waste too much time trying to make sure that the value of each tag is optimal. Don’t go crazy over-tagging, and think of tags more like cousins in the SEO family tree than brothers or sisters.

Keep in mind that no matter how good a job you do with all of the site architecture in the world, or even these few small areas discussed her, none of it matters if your content is poor. If you have badly written content then it will either turn off the search spiders, your site visitors, or both. Content is always the king, and the king rules long and mighty. The best advice is to start the process with a good, experienced SEO copywriter and then build around their content.