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Design an SEO-friendly Website - Top Ten Best Practices

Working with your web designer? What are the most important best practices for creating an SEO-friendly website? Here are our top ten tips for SEO-friendly website design, focusing on the 'on page' techniques that will help propel you to the top of Google.

By Jason McDonald Senior SEO Instructor - JM Internet Group. Posted: January 19, 2011 Share this Top 10 w/ friends! Copy, paste, email this link: http://bit.ly/gGifgQ >>View these tools as a video!

The Big Picture

1.	Know Your Keywords Keywords drive SEO. Know which keywords your customers use, which ones are high volumes, and which are high value. Start with the Google Keyword Tool to identify your best target keywords, and make a systematic keyword worksheet.
2.	Embed Your Keywords in your <Title> Tag The <Title> tag is, by far, the most powerful tag on each and every page of your website, beginning with your most powerful page, your home page. So for each page on your website, write a unique, accurate, and keyword-specific <Title> tag, less than 7-10 words (less than 66 characters).
3.	Write Unique, Accurate META DESCRIPTION Tags The META DESCRIPTION tag doesn't influence whether you show up on Google; it influences the summary displayed on Google search results. So write a pithy, catchy, unique and accurate META DESCRIPTIONs for each and every page (less than 155 characters), something that will attract the click. The tag structure of course is <Meta name="Description" Content="Your Content Here">.
4.	Leverage Your Home Page as a Gateway Your home page is the most powerful page on your website, bar none. So weigh every single word on it, carefully. Place your most important keywords throughout the page. If you service twelve communities in Los Angeles, for example, list each of the twelve on your home page. And, structure your home page as a gateway, with prominent <H1> or <H2> and <A HREF> tags that act as 'gateways' from the home page to your landing pages.
5.	Write Keyword Heavy Content Content is king, or so they say. What's really king is keyword rich content that uses effective HTML page tags. So write lots of keyword heavy, focused content, especially for your landing pages. Take a look at the Geico website - throughout, the company writes very heavy keyword content, with keyword-heavy landing pages that are laser focused on just one keyword family per page.
6.	Deploy the H1 / H2 Family Google adores the H1 / H2 tag family. This is a well kept secret among the SEO community, but now that you know it, embed your most important keyword targets for each page inside the H1 / H2 tags on the page. A best practice is to use the H1 to repeat / reinforce your TITLE tag.
7.	Write Keyword Specific Landing Pages Take your most important long tail searches, and write keyword specific landing pages. One of our favoritefavorite examples, Geico.com, has targeted landing pages on RV Insurance, Motorcycle Insurance, Condo Insurance etc. and performs well on Google for target searches. Follow their lead: identify a target keyword, write a laser targeted landing page, and give this page a prominent link from the home page.
8.	Link Sculpt Your Target Keywords Link sculpting refers to how you use the internal site links of your website. Starting with your home page, create A HREF tag links that embed your target keywords, and then replicate these target keyword links throughout the site. If major keywords for your site are, for example, 'dog boarding,' 'cat boarding,' and 'pet boarding,' then make sure that you have these keywords linked from many other pages on the website, and structured around those particular keywords.
9.	Create a Clickable HTML Sitemap We humans love cool Javascript pull downs and CSS navigation. Problem is Google can't navigate these. So be sure to create a clickable path from your home page to every page on your website. An HTML sitemap is a wonderful best practice - one click from the home page, and then one click from the sitemap to your major gateway pages, and one click from each gateway page to the rest of your website.
10.	Never Stop Writing Google rewards fresh content, and you should oblige. Never stop writing - keep writing new content, fresh content, keyword heavy content. You want a big, beefy, living website that continually evolves, with content that reflects your target keywords, content that evolves with your business, content that reminds Google every day, every week, or every month that your business and website are living breathing invitations for customers to click and come inside.