Samantak Panda SEO HELP FOR WEB DEVELOPER’S

21-October’2010
Every web developer dreams about his website to come at the top of the search results while
searching the keywords in the well known search engines like Google, Yahoo etc. Many developers
think that there are some formulas or algorithms to SEO, which is not the reality. During
development of the web sites developers need to follow few simple steps which will help their sites
to be crawlable by the search engines. You will surely get good results if you follow the following
steps which will bring your web site in the search results gradually, over the time.

1. Domain name of the site: You need to be careful while selecting the domain name of your
site. Many times it happens that developers select the domain name very generic which is
not at all relevant with the business model of the site. Domain name should be logical and
relevant to business of the site.
2. Using Keyword analysis based on website’s business model: Create a keyword glossary
including popular and various keywords depending on the business model of the site by
taking help from any keyword research tool like Google Keyword tool, Google Insights,
Google Trends etc. You should do thorough analysis on the Competitor’s keywords.
3. On-Page optimization :
 Title Tag – Title tag of every web page should start with keywords and should be
relevant to the site business model. Every page of the website should have
unique page title. Whatever text you place in the title tag between the <TITLE>
and </TITLE> will appear in the reverse bar of the web browser when someone
view the web page. Try to avoid using articles, prepositions in page title. The title
should not be more than 15 characters.
 Meta keywords – Keywords of the web page should be relevant to the page
content. Include the keywords based on your business model after analysing the
various popular keywords in the web. The maximum number of characters I
recommend for this tag is 20.
 Meta Description– The meta description tag should contain relevant potential
business keywords as per the business model of the web page. The main content
of the page should reflect the Meta description of the page. The maximum
number of characters I recommend for this tag is 155.
 Meta Robot – The meta tags for robots you can have on your pages to make your
web page reachable to the search engine “bot”.
<meta name="robots" content="<value>" />
There are different robots meta tag values –
index- It allows search engines robots to index the page; you don't
have to add this to your pages, as it's the default.
noindex- It disallows search engines from showing this page in
their results.
none- This is a shortcut for noindex, nofollow, or basically saying
to search engines: don't do anything with this page at all.
follow- It tells the search engines robots to follow the links on the
page, whether it can index it or not.
nofollow- It tells the search engines robots to not follow any links
on the page at all.
noarchive- It prevents the search engines from showing a cached
copy of this page.
nocache- This is same as noarchive, but only used by MSN/Live.
Samantak Panda SEO HELP FOR WEB DEVELOPER’S
21-October’2010
nosnippet- It prevents the search engines from showing a snippet
of this page in the search results and prevents them from caching
the page.
 Anchor Text Link – If you have different anchor tags or hyperlinks inside
your page content and you want those anchor urls to be crwalable by
the search engines, you can add ALT and TITLE attributes with little
description of the text link.
 Site Images Optimization – The images should have proper descriptive ALT and
TITLE attributes. My suggestion is to add the height and width attribute within the
image tags as well. The name of the image should be logical and descriptive. For
example the image should not be like User001.jpg, rather it’s suggested to keep
your image name like David_Beckham.JPG. Try to keep the static images of your
site in a common directory like images and keep the dynamic images like user
images in a sophisticated directory. For this you can build a folder structure that
includes relevant keywords like, images/football/ david_beckham.JPG.
 H1 tag – Each web page should contain only one H1 tag and the content within
this tag should be very strong and important keyword of the site.
 H2, H3 etc tags – You can add more than one H2 or H3 tags. You can keep your
other keywords inside these H2 and H3 tags.
 Styling of the Content – It’s suggested, not to use in line styling within the
content of the page. Create a css file, include the reference in your web page and
write all the classes in the css file. This will make your page content more
readable to the search engines.
4. Create Site Map – Sitemaps were previously used for only graphical representations of the
structure of the websites just to enhance the navigation of the websites. Today, there are
two different types of sitemaps used in web development. One which graphically represents
the structure of the websites to the site users, the other type of Sitemaps that are XML and
or text files that are used to guide search engine bots and crawlers. Search engines like
Google and yahoo place very high emphasis on sitemaps, especially when websites are
dynamic or have dynamic content. They also help in getting different broken links or invisible
links to get indexed. People generally keep the sitemap.xml in the root directory of the web
site. For Google you can register in Google Webmaster tool and submit your sitemap.xml
corresponding to the web site URL. For other search engines you can include an entry in
your robot.txt file-
Like - Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml.
Generally sitemap.xml looks like –
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset mlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/index.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/page2.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/page3.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/page4.html</loc></url>
</urlset>
5. Robot.txt – A robots.txt is a file need to place on your server to tell the various search
engine spiders not to crawl or index certain sections or pages of your web site. You can use it
Samantak Panda SEO HELP FOR WEB DEVELOPER’S
21-October’2010
to prevent indexing, prevent certain areas of your site from being indexes or to issue
individual indexing instructions to specific search engines. If you are building a new page in
your site in a directory called 'hello-example' and do not wish it to be indexed before you are
finished. In this case you do not need to specify each robot that you wish to exclude, you can
simply use a wildcard character, '*', to exclude them all.
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /hello-example /
You can also specify sections not to be indexed by specific search engine bot.
6. Pretty URLs – Search engines likes pretty URLs to crawl. The URLs of the different pages of
your website should be unique, should contain keywords of the site and likely to be pretty.
It’s suggested not to use too many parameters in the URLs. For example –
http://www.example.com?
param1=hello&param2=world&param3=business&param4=london&param5=world.
-This URL is a dirty URL. Search engines don’t like it.
http://www.example.com/hello/world/business/london/world
-This URL is a pretty URL. Crawler likes this.
7. Web Analytics – You can’t really determine success or failure of your web sites activities
without monitoring and measuring their effectiveness. Web analytics helps you to determine
where to improve your web site.
8. Link Building in your site – Link building is one of the most important steps of SEO. There are
many ways to build links for a website. Cross link to different internal pages of your website
from the main homepage or landing page of your website. Participate in your business
related forums and discussions and try to reference your website by providing website link.
You can do social bookmarking of your site. Release newsletters and embed site links in
them. Social web encourages participation in sharing content with other web sites;
introduce voting, commenting and social linkings with social networking sites.
9. Directories – Different online free web directories available where you can submit your
website into the best suited category based on your website’s business model.
10. RSS feed – Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a great technique of distributing links to the
updated content i.e. blog post, article, news, podcast and video related to your site business.
By putting RSS feed, user will get updates on fresh content in the site which will help the
crawler to find the latest articles from your site.