SEO Cheat Sheet

12-Jan-2010 This is a short cheat sheet on the basic standard of what every website should contain.

Behind the Scenes – what to tell your web person.

Page Titles

What They Are: Page titles appear in the top of a user’s browser window. Page titles also appear in the link text on search engine result pages.
Maximum Length: 63 Characters (including spaces)
Format: Description with Keywords – Site Name
Example: Website Design Development E-Commerce Glebe Sydney – Ingress Online

Meta-descriptions:

What They Are: This tag is used as the description of the page when you do a web search. This is more important than meta-keywords.
Maximum Length: 156 Characters (including spaces) as these will be the only words that will be seen.
Format: Provide a short summary of what that specific web page is about so it needs to be enticing enough to encourage a user to click on the link.
Example:

Meta-keywords:

What They Are: Meta-keywords are a list of descriptive words about the content on your web page. Although not weighted very heavily in modern search engine algorithms, meta-keywords do provide search engines with one more element to describe the page.
Maximum Length: 256 Characters (including spaces and commas)
Format: Each keyword or keyword phrase should be separated by comma. Each keyword phrase is to be used only once. Although you have a 256 character maximum to work with, all 256 characters do not have to be used.
Example: website design company, website development company, web design company, web development company, web site design company, web site development company.

Structure of your URLs

What They Are: URL's is the website address of the page you are viewing.
Maximum Length: No more than 4 pages deep eg http://www.ingress.com/people/places/things.html
Format: Make sure your URLs contain real words preferably keywords on what the page is about and not numbers or other characters. Page names should be lower case and words separated by a dash. Each page should have a descriptive name
Example:http://www.ingress.com/about-ingress-online-web-design/web-design-people/web-design-about-us.html

Website Analytics

Google Analytics or some sort of website statistics should be installed on every page of your site so you can view easy-to-understand reports on your visitors - where they come from, how they use your site, what converts them into customers, and much more. This is a free service from Google and will give you vital information about your site and its visitors. http://www.google.com/analytics/

Heading tags

<h1>Most Important</h1>
<h2>Second Most Important</h2>
<h3>Third Most Important</h3>

What you can do

Website Menu

Try and use a text menu and make sure there is room to add more items / pages. Avoid going overboard with slicing and dicing your content (it takes twenty clicks to get to deep content) Use Breadcrumb navigation to help users and search engines navigate the site eg Home > About Ingress Online > People

Graphics / Images / Pictures

What They Are: Graphics often combine text, illustration, and color and may consist of typography alone.
Best use: Graphics should be used for photos only. In some cases it is necessary to use graphics for words to create the desired creative feel for the site. For all graphics you should ensure there is alternative (Alt) text for the graphic and it is descriptive of what the graphic represents or the page that it is on.
Format: Use brief, but descriptive file names and alt text
Example: website-design-development-about-us.jpg

Link Text

This text tells users and search engines something about the page you're linking to. Links on your page may be internal—pointing to other pages on your site—or external—leading to content on other sites. In either of these cases, the better your anchor text is, the easier it is for users to navigate and for search engines to understand what the page you're linking to is about.

Recommended
View our website design products

Avoid if possible
Find out more or Click here

Writing for the web

Typically 500-750 words per page (for their preferred landing pages) or at least 250-300 unique words to set the tone from the keywords. The idea is to use related synonyms and supporting keywords (based on a theme) for targeting the keyword with that page.

Break your keyword sets/phrases into tiers or alternates to enable a better flow while maximizing density and penetration.

Example: Target: SEO copywriting Tier 1: SEO copywriting Tier 2: SEO copywriter Tier 3: Writing copy for SEO Tier 4: SEO copywriting services

Example Sentence: "Instead of spending time evaluating SEO copywriting Services become a SEO copywriter yourself by following these guidelines and you'll be writing copy for SEO in no time."

See how the keywords and their variation are repeated but the copy flows.

Download Googles Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide	Download this cheatsheet in PDF format