SEO: Where do I start?
- by James
Hi,
I am primarily a software developer however I tend to delve in some web development from time to time. I have recently been asked to have a look at a friends website as they are wanting to improve their position in search engine results i.e. google/yahoo etc. I am aware there is no guarentee that their position will change, however, I do know there are techniques/ways to make your website more visible to search engine spiders and to consequently improve your position in the rankings i.e. performing SEO.
Before I started looking at the SEO of the site I did the following prerequsite checks:
Ran the website through the W3C Markup Validator and the W3C CSS Validator services.
Looked through the markup code manually (check for meta tags etc)
Performed a thorough cross browser compatibility test.
From those checks, the following was evident:
No SEO has been performed on the site before.
The website has been developed using a visual editing tool such as dreamweaver (as it failed the validation services miserably and tables where being used everywhere!)
The site is fairly cross browser compatibile (only some slight issues with IE8 which are easily resolved).
How the site navigation is, isn't very search engine friendly (e.g. index.php?page=home)
I can see right away a major improvement for SEO (or I at least think) would be to change the way the website is structured i.e. change from using dynamic pages such as "index.php?page=home" and actually having pages called "home.html". Other area's would be to add meta tags to identify keywords, and then sprinkling these keywords over the pages.
As I am a rookie in this department, could anyone give me some advice on how I could perform thorough SEO on this website?
Thanks in advance.
