SEO list for creating the *perfect* website
-
If you could build your website from scratch and have your developers do anything you want (within reason), what list of SEO requirements would you send them?
Does anyone know of any good articles on the perfect SEO wish list?
Happy Holidays!
-
I agree.... my answer for NO CMS is based upon in-house work. If I had clients this could be a huge briarpatch.
-
And, I think that was the point. If the world were perfect, I would have a sailboat that was very fast like a J Boat and was the perfect cruiser like a Pacific Seacraft. Everything is a tradeoff.
You and EGOL made great points around why no CMS. I agree. As an agency we just don't have that luxury for our clients and so we use them. Just two sides to a coin.
-
I am not saying you cannot rank using a CMS, but simply you can do better by hand. A road sweeper can clean the street, but sometimes you need to get out with a broom to get into the corners, or even bend down and pick something up by hand.
-
All Great Comments, and Don't forget the basics such as.
- Setup a Google Account with marketing@domain.com
- Setup Google Webmaster Tools
- Setup Bing Webmaster Tools
- Upload Google, MSN verification HTML Code
- Build a Google /sitemap.xml file and upload then submit it to Google
- Signup for Google Analytics and setup tracking code on each page for tracking
- Setup Funnels within Google Analytics for tracking conversions
- Run a Server Check to test headers to make sure that the server is not a virtual server, blacklisted server
- Run Xenu for Broken Links, work to get any links fixed
- Web page title, description and heading tags.
- Develop a list for where the Company can improve content based upon the discovery of low hanging fruit “keywords”
- Run Competitor Analysis Reports to help understand how to improve rankings
- Build a robots.txt file to put in the root of the website
- Run keyword list and find other opportunities for rankings
- Run Reports to determine back links
- Run Reports on competition back links and look for areas we can leverage for expansion of external linking
- Add to Google Maps
- Add to Bing Maps
- Test with SEOMOZ Tools
- Run a report to find possible industry related forums as well other sites to post on for driving more traffic and related links
- Setup 301 redirect for website to go to www
- Setup Twitter profile
- Setup Facebook Page
- Setup Youtube Channel
- Setup a Google + Page
This is just a Phase 1 List there are so many other things to think about, focus on your visitors and content, watch your visitors and tweak it based on behavior. Look at your bounce rates, Time on site, ETC.
-
Not everyone codes for different reasons. Dummies use html editors for dummies, so put me in that group. We use a CMS and have plenty of page 1 ranks. Sorry, but me and my kids don't live in an ideal world.
-
If someone has just created a site with a CMS, it is hard to tell them it may not be a good idea. Its like telling them their kids are ugly.
-
I agree with not using a CMS.... with the exception of a couple of blogs my sites are all hard-coded html.... it enables you to make finely-crafted arrows.
Some people might give the thumbs down for a comment like this.... they are using crooked sticks for their arrows.
-
If it is a local ecommerce site (doing primary business in metro/state), local SEO is critical at startup. It is a good way to generate sales quickly while you build links/page authority/domain authority for broader more competitive keywords.
-
He did ask for a perfect site, in that case yes, i would suggest hand coded with complete control. I agree with the trade of with cost of hiring a developer and the ease of DIY CMS, but to be perfect it should be bespoke no redirects, no html errors, no script or css mixed in html. well segmented with html5, described with microdata, prefect crawlability. You just can’t get all this done perfectly with CMS.
But i agree there are horses for courses
-
Okay, If using a developer to build a site from scratch, this is a list of considerations that I have got so far.
Site Architecture
Use keyword rich breadcrumbs
Internal Link structure
- Page Depth
- Quantity of Internal Links
- Quality of Internal links
- Index Canonicalization
XML Sitemaps
Page Optimisation
- Page Titles
- Meta Descriptions
- H1 Tags
- URLS
- Duplicate Content
- Robots.txt
- HTTP Status Codes
- Image alt attricbutes
- Textual Content
Anything else?
-
Good job Miranda,
This is a thought provoking question. When I first read Alan's response I thought, "wait a minute, Alan" and then realized he answered it perfectly for Alan. I am not a developer and the thought of providing a client a site that required them to have one available did not make sense. At the same time, I can tell you with several of the known CMS's available there are problems within the SEO that if not addressed are at least annoying.
So, I would say, to the developers:
Use a CMS that allows the client the most ease of use within the context of providing the best framework for their project.
Make the key on site/on page SEO pieces easy for someone with even a small amt of ability: Title tags (Alan would give us code that would not allow a duplicate as an example), You would be required to use an H1, etc.
I would tell them I wanted a url structure that was almost flat.
That an internal link had to go to something relevant.
But, before I went to them, I would be very clear what it was we desired the web site to do for us.
Thanks,
-
#1 i would not use a CMS, i would code it from scratch and make sure I got a prefect score using the Bing SEO toolkit, making sure the search engines can crawl your site perfectly is something that is hard to fix later on down the road.
#2 I would make sure I have a good linking structure to allow link juice to flow to the correct places.
#3 I would think long and hard on my user friendly URL’s from the start
That’s a good start, I will let others add or subtract from the list.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Looking for list Pro's & Con's of removing Folder from URL?
Hi We have a sub-folder ("/shop-by-department/") which is pretty much useless on our site and I'm looking to remove it. But the team want a list of the Pro's & Con's in doing so. So for example I'll be changing www.example.ie/shop-by-department/furniture/beds/product-a to www.example.ie/furniture/beds/product-a I know there will be an intial hit as Google adjusts to the change but think it's definitely the way to go. I was lookng for a complete list of the Pro's & Con's to send onto the team. It'll be going to the traditional marketing (print, radio, etc.) too so can ve top-level points too. Hope you can help! Thanks
Web Design | | Frankie-BTDublin0 -
SEO Consulting for HUGE Website. How Big Is TOO Big Of A Change?
SEO Consulting for a HUGE Website. Their h1 tags have instagram/twitter, h2 have their menu/what's trending and h3 is the article title. Here's what I want to do... MY MAIN QUESTION: This site has tens of thousands of pages, all articles beyond the few dozen category/tag pages they have. If I change the structure to the following, will it be too much of a system shock to Google? Will this actually HURT them? Currently on the site: - h1 tags point to Twitter/Instagram sidebar widgets
Web Design | | BrianGilmore
h2 tags point to the menu/what’s trending section (which is the same on every page)
h3 points to the Title of the Article I want to change it to this: - h1 tags should delineate the article's name. That's all they should really be used for.
h2-4 should be reserved for article subheadings to be used by the editorial staff. EDIT: 30% of their >11 million monthly uniques come from search. I don't want to eff with that, but the way that NONE of their pages have optimized words, they have no sitemap, webmaster tools and are still doing this well makes me think that even putting in minimal changes to tidy things up will help them bring it to 70% organic search.0 -
New website and new domain
Hi, We have a domain with current e-commerce site on, about 5 years old. We have a new website being built with a different company and a new domain name. We are transferring our old domain over to new provider and 301'ing the domain to new domain. However, we can not take the current website with us, so we lose all our links/pages etc.. How important would it be to take a wrap of our current website to keep all the pages alive? Is there anything we can do so oldurl.com/brand/tshirt/ doesnt lose its rank? Can we 301 individual pages if we dont have the actual website? Just the domain name. Any help be great. Thanks
Web Design | | YNWA0 -
For a real estate website, is a different mobile site warranted vs a responsive site?
I researched the major real estate websites: Zillow, Trulia, Remax, Keller Williams, Century 21, etc. They all have a separate mobile site and not a responsive one. The client wants it to be easy to search for properties from a smartphone. Is it possible to get a responsive version of a real estate website on a smartphone?
Web Design | | MassMedia0 -
What seo benefit does setting up a photo gallery where each photo is a separate web page?
what seo benefit does setting up a photo gallery where each photo is a separate web page? My old SEO guy set up my photo gallery like that claiming that because each photo was a separate page, it added a big seo benefit and i never understood what he was talking about. Maybe alt text on the photo with key phrases in it pointing to my other pages to give my site a theme for google? I'm not really sure. He has since moved away and i am considering redoing the photo gallery to multiple images on one page to be more user friendly to my users. This photo gallery is 3 years old and the photos might have some page rank to them helping my site so i don't want to remove this gallery if there really is a benefit to it and it will hurt my site. I once removed four static page rank 3 pages from my site that weren't used for my site anymore and my rankings dropped 5 positions. Thoughts anyone? Thanks! Ron
Web Design | | Ron100 -
Yes or No for Ampersand "&" in SEO URLs
Hi Mozzers I would like to know how crawlers see the ampersand (& or &) in your URLs and if Google frown upon this or not? As far as I know they purely recognise this as "and" is this correct and is there any best practice for implementing this, as I know a lot of people complained before about & in links and that it is better to use it as &, but this is not on links, this is on URLs. Reason for this is that we looking to move onto an ASP.Net MVC framework (any suggestions for a different framework are welcome, we still just planning out future development) and in order to make use of the filter options we have on our site we need a parameter to indicate the difference on a routing level (routing sends to controller, controller sends to model, model sends to controller and controller sends to view < this is pattern of a request that comes in on the framework we will be using). I already have -'s and /'s in the URLs (which is for my SEO structuring) so these syntax can't be used for identifying filters the user clicks or uses to define their search as it will create a complete mess in the system. Now we looking at & to say; OK, when a user lands on /accommodation and they selects De Kelders (which is a destination in our area) the page will be /accommodation/de-kelders on this page they can define their search further to say they are looking for 5 star accommodation and it should be close to the beach, this is where the routing needs some guidance and we looking to have it as follow: /accommodation/de-kelders/5-star&close-to-the-beach. Now, does the "&" get identified by search engines on a URL level as "and" and does this cause any issues with crawling or indexation or would it be best to look at another solution? Thanks, Chris Captivate
Web Design | | DROIDSTERS0 -
SEO and Modal Windows
Hi all, My website has a Login and Join Us option on every page in the site. Each Login and Join Us window pops up as a modal window. In other words, the user must interact with it before they are taken somewhere else (whether they close it or fill it in). It has come to my attention that this is being counted as duplicate content. Is there any way around this? It's calling duplicate content on practically the whole website. Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | Info12340 -
Should I Remove URL extentions for SEO?
We are having a developer design our website with Magento. I noticed the main pages such as About Us have no file extention in the URL. But the product pages have a .html file extention. I was once told to remove the file extentions. Are there benefits to removing the .html file extension and if so, is there a way we can do this using Magento?
Web Design | | hfranz0