Search Engine Marketing
Tips
Landing Page Best
Practices and Expert Tips (and some general SEO/SEM tips)
By
Phil Yeh
- Every page has a page
name identified by a high Trellian-score key phrase most
relevant to that particular page. For example, a page
that talks about
Jiu-Jitsu tournaments should have the page
name: jiu-jitsu-tournaments.htm with the URL:
http://www.philyeh.com/jiu-jitsu-tournaments.htm
(assuming "jiu jitsu tournaments" is the highest-Trellian-score way to describe
that subject). Use hyphens to separate words - Google
ignores underscores!
- Every page has a unique Title Tag that includes 2-3 key
phrases (63 characters max), separated by hyphens, commas,
or pipes. The site name (XYZ.com) appears in
the Title Tag only at the end (if at all). For example, for
automotive site eAuto.com, the Title Tag might look
like: New Cars - New Car Quotes - eAuto.com
- Every page has a unique Meta Description and
a unique set of Meta Keywords
(3-5 relevant key phrases, avoid over-stuffing). Keep
Meta Description to 150 characters max and include
targeted key phrases in the Meta Description at least
once each
- Every page has a unique H1 tag as close as possible to the
top of the <body>. Style in external CSS to achieve
desired look. Use H2 and H3 for less important key
phrases
- All links
(internal and external) should use anchor text that includes the keywords of the
page that is being linked to. Whenever possible, don't
link to any page on the site using the site name (XYZ.com)
as the link text. Make sure the link and
text are not stand-alone, but buried in as much relevant
content as possible (shoot for at least one complete
sentence before and after, with the anchor text existing
within another complete sentence). Consult your friendly
neighborhood search engine
marketing
expert if you're not sure how to do this. The
preceding sentence is an example of how to use anchor
text for the homepage of PhilYeh.com. Also, whenever
possible, include only one link per page to the
targeted/linked page. If you have multiple links to the
same target page from one page, try to
use the same anchor text. If that's impossible, the link
higher up in the code should have the more desired
anchor text
- An additional note on
external back-links: Avoid having too many reciprocal links.
Put the extra work into creating 3-way links (A links to
B, B links to C, and C links to A)
- If you have multiple
homepages that were developed for A/B/multivariate
testing, the version with the highest score on WebsiteGrader.com sits at the top-level domain.
Don't forward from your index page to another page
- Separate content from
style as much as possible. Place all styles in external
CSS, link to it in <head>. Avoid using inline styles and
header styles. Create CSS selectors to define any HTML
elements that need styling. Avoid using deprecated HTML
tags for styling, including <font>, <strong>,etc.;
define fonts and style text in external CSS. As much as
possible, place JavaScript in external file, link to it
in <head>
- Limit tables, especially
nested tables. Instead, use div elements and
position/style with CSS selectors
- Every page should have
minimum 2-3 paragraphs worth of keyword-heavy text, and
follow “All text as text” rule (IE: text embedded in
images don't count toward this rule-of-thumb). Exceptions to “all text as text” rule:
Logo of site, maybe one primary call-to-action adjacent
to the form, submit button. For the exceptions, the text
of the graphic needs to be an alt attribute for that
graphic
- Limit graphics as much
as possible. When graphics are used, include descriptive
alt attributes (words separated by hyphens). For
example: <img src="new-bmw-picture.jpg" alt="All New BMW
for 2008" />. Bonus: Use the alt attributes and
image names as opportunities to increase keyword
density
- If the site has multiple
pages, and you are building a direct-response site, then every page has the first-step call-to-action on
it (EG: for new car quote sites, every page would have
the make-model-trim selector). First step should be well
above the fold; no part of the form, including submit
button, falls below 640 pixels from the top of the page
.
Above-the-fold rule
applies to every field and button on every page in the
flow
- Create Custom 404 pages,
like this: http://www.philyeh.com/blah-blah-blah
- If you move/rename a
page that has been indexed by the search engines, make
sure to do a 301/302 redirect from the old page to the
new page
- Download Xenu's Link
Sleuth to make sure your site doesn't have broken links.
Search engines hate sites with broken links!
- Add XML sitemap to the
robots.txt: sitemap:
http://www.website.com/sitemap.xml
- Put <link rel="canonical"
href="http://www.url.com/page.htm?trackingid=desired-URL"
/> into the head of the undesired version of a duplicate
URL that you have canonicalization problems with.
Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc. have agreed on this attribute
as a way of recognizing which version of the duplicate
page you wish to have indexed. Not doing so risks
dilution in PageRank, in-bound link count, etc.
- Also follow all rules
from
SEOmoz Cheat Sheet
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