Oct
13
2008

The holistic approach to designing search engine optimised sites

We at Retiarius are firm believers that you cannot ‘bolt on’ good SEO performance once a site has been made. You have to design the site from the ground up to maximise its search engine optimisation potential.

We call this our ‘holistic’ site design philosphy.  All the elements of the site have to work in a harmonious manner to maximise the SEO potential.

These elements include:

  • Excluding Shockwave and Flash animations and Flash-based navigation from the site – you won’t stand a chance of having a search engine spider your site if you use Flash navigation.
  • Choosing keywords for each individual page, rather than a generic set of keywords for the site used on each page, so that you maximise the keyword density on that page. This takes longer but really improves the SEO performance for that page.
  • Ensuring that the main keywords are reflected in the
    • page title
    • file name
    • meta description
    • first 128 words on the page
    • image titles and alt statements
    • link tags
  • The page is spelled correctly (see article)
  • The page fully meets W3C standards
  • The site is searchable using the W3C semantic checker, as this simulates how the search engines extract data.
  • Using SEO add-ons if designing a blog-based site. WordPress has some very good free SEO plugins for its blogging system.
  • Effective use of subdomains (see article)

We used this holistic approach for our latest site for Buxton Press which will utilise a blog on a subdomain to provide linkbait for its business and provide a news and job vacancies system for the company.

Effective search engine optimisation is a painstaking process but we at Retiarius believe it is worth it.

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