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Best practices for producing and managing a search engine friendly website — be seen.

Last updated: May 29, 2007

Overall, the most expeditious thing a company can do to drive higher Organic rankings based on keyword searches, is to make available relevant, quality content for your users. Add new, high quality content often, leverage existing content, and ensure all landing pages are search engine friendly.

The following article identifies a foundational set of best practices which, when applied consistently, should result in a search engine friendly website — a website which has been designed and produced for maximum SEO/SEM potential. We've also thrown in some keyword placement tips and other useful hints. Even so, this is not an article about creating optimized content or conducting keyword research — it's about setting the stage for successful SEO campaigns for the lifetime of your website.

Best Production Practices for a Search Engine Friendly Website

The following general recommendations are for creating a search engine friendly website through practical design, standards-based coding, and concentrated content presentation resulting in maximizing exposure to Internet search engines. These recommendations apply to any website and are not presented in any order of precedence or ranked by individual significance. They should be considered as a whole for best results.

  1. Separate web page design/layout and HTML. In order to make it easier for search engine spiders to index the content your users see, write standards-based HTML for structure and implement external CSS for design layout.

    A few examples are:
    • Use standard markup for headers and style with CSS. Always use CSS styled <h> tags (i.e. <h1>, <h2>, <h3> tags) for headers and place keywords in the headers as appropriate.
    • Use standard markup for lists and style with CSS. Create lists using <ol> and <ul> tags and style using CSS.
    • Design rollover navigation using CSS styled text. CSS is robust in its ability to style text navigation and compares favorably to the image menus.
  2. Write unique and meaningful HTML titles. Use keywords to accurately describe the web page contents. Also, consider the order of the keywords in the title. If your branding is well established, you may want to consider HTML titles that place industry keywords before your company name. At this time, Google displays approximately the first 60 - 65 characters of HTML titles.
  3. Provide unique and meaningful meta descriptions. Meta descriptions should be used for all web pages made available to the search engines. Think of meta descriptions as brief summaries of approximately 150 characters or less.
  4. Ensure JavaScript is search engine friendly. Use with caution and make sure spiders are able to index JavaScript-driven content (e.g. links for popup windows, JavaScript rollover navigation, etc.). If navigation uses JavaScript, consider creating a text version and place it in the footer. Also, place identical, unscripted content in <noscript> tags.
  5. Create an external file(s) for JavaScript. Reducing the JavaScript between the <head> tags by externalizing the script will likely improve web page indexing efficiency.
  6. Only use Flash as a design enhancement. Use flash as you would other imagery — to add interest to specific pages. Avoid using Flash to create an entire website or to create site wide navigation.
  7. Avoid the use of splash pages. Instead, create an eye catching home page with thoughtfully written content, providing links to the site's most important web pages.
  8. Do not use frames. Content indexing agents have difficulty spidering framesets. For example, a search engine may return a link to a single frame of a frameset (i.e. a partial page rendering).
  9. Create a site map. Link to your site map from every page. Fast and easy access to your site map provides indexing crawlers with a concentrated dose of the website's most important internal links.
  10. Use descriptive link text. Create link text using relevant phrases describing the link's destination. Avoid using generic text (e.g. “click here”), opting instead for descriptive text (e.g. “learn more about new widget”).
  11. Use ALT descriptions. Search engine crawlers may index text contained in ALT descriptions. Be thoughtful when writing alt descriptions and keep them short but descriptive.
  12. Create search engine friendly URLs. Search engines may have difficulty indexing dynamically served URLs consisting of complex query strings. This issue can often be addressed through the use of URL rewriting scripts.

Search Engine Friendly Best Practices for Website Architecture and Naming Conventions

  • Keep the site (docroot) shallow. A shallow docroot, up to 3 levels deep, will likely make it easier for the spiders to access most files.
  • Create a separate file for each type of service or product. Name files, when appropriate, using key phrases, separating the words in the filename by hyphens or underscores. Separate files will facilitate optimizing for each product/service, enabling you to take full advantage of the HTML elements which matter most for SEO (e.g. <title> tags, <h> tags, etc.).
  • Architect the website properly from the start. Updating physical website architecture after search engines have indexed the site should be avoided whenever possible as it may be detrimental to SEO efforts.

Other, Supportive, Best Practices

  • Check link integrity regularly to ensure all links resolve.
  • Create custom error pages.
  • Regularly check cross browser compatibility
  • Check coding standards adherence using an HTML validator application or service.
  • Because most search engines "see" like a text browser "sees", test your website using a text browser such as Lynx.
  • Conduct regular spell checks.
  • Conduct regular analysis of web server access logs.
  • Retain and archive access logs for historical analysis.
  • Use a robots.txt file for excluding specific files from search engine indexing.
  • Produce web pages for your users — never create content which displays for the search engine but not the user.

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