Responsible web developers today realize the difference between keywording and making a site search engine friendly. Although it is tempting to start keywording like mad, thinking that you'll soon start popping up on page 1 of Google, the reality is that effective search engine optimization is a much more esoteric process.
Many issues regarding a website's "crawlability" may not be revealed until the spiders have started crawling and indexing the site. It is at this time that many performance issues are revealed, and the Optimizer can begin digging into the causes of the problems.
Because some of these issues can only be resolved over time, it is critical to pay special attention to these matters to keep your site search engine friendly. At Actualize Studio, we try to convey this important reality to our clients, and is why we offer various levels of SEO maintenance plans.
Some of the more common issues:
Duplicate Pages And/Or Content
This can be defined as a single page that can be accessed via different URLs, content that is copied across multiple pages throughout your site, or pages thats content can be found on other sites. Some of these issues are more damaging than others, but ultimately you want each page to have one single URL and to try to have some unique content on every page.
Repeating Page Titles And/Or Meta Descriptions
This generally occurs on all the remaining site pages that have not been specifically keyworded or optimized. It is these pages that tend to have the same title and meta tag information. It is one of the primary reasons Actualize Studio believes in utilizing Content Management Systems that allow page-specific metadata for our clients, as they can allow simple modifications
to each page of the site.
The end result of the repetitive title and meta descriptions is search engines place less value on those pages and may not ever fully index your site. This weighs down the indexed pages, particularly on smaller sites.
Excessive or Bad Code
Another reason Actualize Studio suggests implementing a Content Management System is the ability to ensure that each page rendered on your site has clean, properly formatted HTML code. Tools such as Dreamweaver tend to add unneccessary code to your pages, and this slows page download times. Search engines may penalize you for this, and it could affect your end-user experience.
Proper use of tags correctly assigns weight to certain areas of your pages and can improve the rankings of your keywords as well. Improper use can assign importance to content you may not wish to.
Internal Links
Navigation through your site is incredibly important to search engines, as they use this in an attempt to determine page importance. Another great tool is to link text blocks to relevant areas of the site. Not only does this help visitors to browse across your site, it provides a similar map for the search engines to determine what information you deem important.
These tips, combined with a well thought out keywording strategy, are the basic requirements of any responsible SEO Analyst, and are the core of Actualize Studio's SEO services.