Hungerford Web Design Blog

Page Titles

The title of your webpage(s) is absolutely critical in your goal for good Search Engine listings. The page title you choose is what you should expect to see in a search engine. Consider your page content and how the title best describes that content. Ensure you check the spelling of those titles and keep themshort to avoid truncation.

Avoid repeating titles

Something we are considering at the moment is the fact that page titles should not be the same across a site. We use includes a lot on our main site and I am currently writing a way of dynamically generating the page title from the navigation structure.

Titles exisiting in content

Ensure that the words within your page titles exist as keywords within your content. Think of your page like a book. If the title was “war” and the book was about cookery then you would probably feel that the title of the book was misleading. The same principles apply here.

Technorati Tags: Keywords, Navigation Structure, Page Content, Page Titles, Search Engine Listings, SEO, Spelling

Site Mapping

A map of your site (site map/sitemap) is crucial for both Search Engines and your users. It is basically a repository of your links which in one file can show everything you have to offer (again, for both engines and users).

We wrote a script to automatically create a visual sitemap for our users as well as an XML sitemap for google. You can do this manually though and it really isn’t a lot of work for most small to medium sized sites. For visual sitemaps simply consider your layout and check all of your links. For an XML sitemap, search “Google sitemaps” for the syntax.

We will post up our code in a day or two so you can steal it if you wish.

Technorati Tags: Google, Lot, Map Site, Repository, Search Engines, Search Google, SEO, Site Map, Sitemap Search, Sitemaps, Syntax, Visual Sitemap, Xml Sitemap

Everybody has to start somewhere. I remember trying to optimise my first site for search engines. It was a site I had written about 6 months before and I was pretty yound and very uninformed. I had written this site in one of the worst WYSIWYG site design programs ever (you can probably guess which) and even now I can remember just how difficult it was. Here are a few tips to start you on a journey considering Search Engine Optimisation (Optimization to those on the other side of the Atlantic).

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Technorati Tags: Google, Javascript Frames, Journey, Key Point, Optimization, Pita, Reason, Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Robots, Search Engines, SEO, Single File, Source Code, Two Ways, Visual Component, Visually Impaired, Wysiwyg

Standards Compliance

This is a wider issue than just SEO. Writing compliant code can make sure that your site is accessible to those with impairment(s), your site is visible in a large number of browsers (including text browsers) and shows a level of commitment to quality for starters.

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Technorati Tags: Compliance, Correctness, Development Tools, Grammar, H3, Heading Tags, Incorrect Key, Laptop, Long Time, Markup, Paragraphs, Robots, Search Engines, SEO, Starters, Syntax Checker, Text Browsers, Typo, Validation Standards, Variations