Richard Bate

For a successful website, quality traffic is the key to its success. Here are some basic SEO tips to consider when building or updating your website.

1. Consider your page title
Your page title is very important tactic in SEO when determining your position within search engines. Make sure the title is relevant to the page content and includes the keywords you are trying to emphasise and ensure that each page title is unique.

2. Quality content is king
Always try to make unique content on the subject your website is covering. Good quality content is more likely to be passed around and linked if it was informative to the reader. Remember, Google will reward sites that continually provide useful content to its readers. The main goal for any search engine is to provide search results to relevant and useful content.

3. Avoid duplicate content
Search engines will penalise duplicate content. One major offender for this is how website addresses are handled as default. For example, as default your website can be accessed via www.domain.com, domain.com, www.domain.com/index.html and domain.com/index.html.

Search engines will class this as four separate pages even though its actually the same page being displayed. A way round this is to include a rewrite rule in your .htaccess file forcing search engines and browsers to be accessable by one single domain (EG: http://www.domain.com/)

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.tld$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.tld/$1 [R=301,L]
 
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} /index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ / [R=301,L]

For more information on .htaccess url rewriting i recommend you read this article.

4. Title and ALT tags in links and images
Include title tags in your internal links to emphasise its content. Include your targeted keywords and a useful sentence to give your some added emphasis in your SEO results. Example:

<a title="Funny cat pictures" href="http://www.catpictures.com/funny_cats.html">Funny cat pictures</a>

Its also useful to include keywords in image alt and title tags. This is helpful when trying to gain better results on Google Image searches. It is also useful for visitors that have images disabled. The alt tag will explain what the picture is about. Example:

<img class="alignnone" title="My new iPhone arrived today" src="/imgs/my-new-iphone.jpg" alt="My new iPhone arrived today" />