Omar Kattan - search in a nutshell

Here’s a quick guide to audit your site for SEO best practices:

• Robots.txt file

First ensure that it exists.  If it doesn’t, create one.  Its a simple text file called “robots.txt”.  Once you create your robots.txt file you can add to it your Google XML sitemap and use it to give instructions to search engines about which folders on your site to index and which ones to stay away from. 

• Navigation

Is you navigation intuitive?  By that I mean,, does it make sense to users?  If it make sense to users then most likely it also makes sense and is search friendly to search engines.  Here are a couple of things to keep in mind when optimising your navigation structure. 

• Some studies have shown that search engine users prefer split navigation (ie top navigation for the section pages and left hand navigation for the category level and important pages)

• Ensure that you don’t have the same long navigation on the left hand site across the entire site as this will cause issues such as duplicate content always showing up on top of the actual content (unless you’ve addressed this with css positioning).

• Make sure that the navigation is specific for the section/category of the site the visitor is on.

• Content Visibility

This is a no brainer, make sure your content is visible to search engines!  Search engines like basic HTML document and dislike content built with javascript, flash etc… (Although new developments in Flash now allow search engines to read its content and links.  Stick to basic HTML though!

• Trappings Page (404 error page)

Make sure that your site has a “404″ trappings page that tells your visitors if they’ve landed on a page that is no longer on your site.  A 404 trappings page is also useful to keep search engines spidering your entire site if they happen across dead links.  Although too many 404 page errors will devalue your site in the search results! 

• Canonicalisation

Ensure that you only have one version of each of your site’s pages and especially the homepage!  Because of the way severs work, the following two urls are considered the same:  www.yoursite.com, yoursite.com and yoursite.com/index.html.  Ensure that you redirect two of the above to your preferred one.  Also let Google know which one that is by setting up an account in Webmaster Tools.  Make sure you do the same for all your site’s internal folders.

• Duplicate Content

There are various reason why you may have duplicate content including: 

1. You stole it

2. You Syndicated it

3. You’re using an affiliate product feed

4. You’ve not addressed canonicalisation (see above)

5. You have too much similar content in common sections of your site such as site wide footers , headers)

All the above possibilities can cause your site to be devalued so you need to adress them by either removing this content, modifying it, or telling search engines not to index it (see Robots.txt above)

• Internal Links

Internal links are the only opportunity to control the link building process by building keyword-rich links pointing to your site’s pages.  Granted these links are less valuable than external links from authority sites but nonetheless, they are links and if used wisely, they can make a BIG difference in your rankings!

• Load Time

Another no brainer.  Make sure that your site loads quickly 99.99999 percent of the time.  Search engines want the best possible experience for their users and they DO NOT want to serve pages that take ages to load.  Don’t cut corners on this one folks.  Invest in a good host!

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