Are you web pages ‘valid’?  Valid??  What does that mean?

Web pages are typically written using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). It’s important that your site uses valid HTML and CSS code so that the search engines can index your site properly.

Like all computer languages, HTML and CSS change constantly. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the governing body that establishes what is valid HTML/CSS and what is not. Search engines obey the HTML/CSS standard. If there are errors in the HTML/CSS code of your web page, then search engines might not be able to read your web page properly.  Accordingly, you may be penalised in the rankings.

To test your site for valid code, visit http://www.w3.org/QA/Tools/

It’s important then that you a) only display original content that is not replicated elsewhere on the internet, or b) optimise your site so that it is chosen as the most authoritative source (if you do happen to publish content that is replicated elsewhere).

A point to note – the content doesn’t need to be identical for it to be excluded from Google. The search engines know when content has been altered slightly in an attempt to dupe them!

Also, if you publish various versions of the same content on your site (eg regular view, mobile view, text format, print version), then the search engines might penalise you – use the NOFOLLOW, NOINDEX metatag to ‘hide’ certain versions of content from the search engines, because this duplicate content could be seen as an attempt to manipulate the search engines.

If you do use syndicated content, then you need to be optimised for the search engines to make sure that you are ‘the one’ that appears in search results – most importantly, you need to have quality back links from other authoritative and thematically-similar websites.

The best bet is to create your own quality, unique content – but be aware that your content may be republished without your permission elsewhere on the web in an attempt to improve search engine results…this eventuality will be the subject of another post at a later time.

One thing that will attract customers to your website is free stuff.  Everybody likes to get something for nix. 

You should consider offering something on your site for free – for example, a white paper, an electronic book, free reports, forms or templates.  This will help to attract prospective customers to your website and to help build your mailing list.

Here’s some free stuff that I provide on my company website: http://www.bluetrainenterprises.com.au/goodies-useful-docs-templates.html.  I am getting some good traffic to this page, as people go in search of CV templates, interview proformas and small business templates.

Here are some tips for providing free content:

- Make sure that the free stuff is good stuff – there’s no point providing something that is not good quality.  The free stuff needs to be representative of the quality of your business and help build your credibility in the eyes of  prospective customers.

- It is important that the free stuff is good, but you shouldn’t give away your entire suite of intellectual property for free!  Your free stuff should be a taster, prompting the recipient to engage in further business with your organisation.  For example, you might offer a free PDF containing a single chapter of a book you have written - if the recipient enjoys reading the free chapter, then it is likely that they will want to purchase the entire book.

- Ensure that your free stuff contains appropriate copyright notices and links back to your business, so that readers who have been forwarded your document know where it emanates from and can get in contact with you.  It should also be in an uneditable format – ie. PDF instead of MS Word – so that the content is not easily stolen and rebranded (this is a real problem on the web today).

- You should try and capture the prospect’s contact details prior to giving them access to the free stuff – for example, you might only give a person access to a free report once they have filled out an online form that provides you with their email address details.  This interaction enables you to market to the prospect at a later time via an email newsletter or a follow up phone call  (it’s a good idea to expressly state what you intend to do with the contact details on the subscription page, in accordance with privacy guidelines)

- Do a follow up with all recipients, preferably by telephone.  The fact that the prospect has downloaded a free document or tool from your website ensures that your call is not ‘cold’ – you have a context in which your phone conversation can take place, making it easier to determine whether the prospect is interested in further engagement with your organisation.  At the very least, you can ask the prospect whether they enjoyed the free product and whether they have any suggestions for improving it.

- Many people use the search term ‘free’ in their search engine queries – make sure that your pages and documents are search engine optimised for this work.  For example, if you are offering a ‘free CV template’, then consider having a separate HTML page optimised for this search term combination.  That way, you are likely to attract many more people to your site.

You have probably heard the mantra ‘content is king’ is web circles. Well, nothing is truer than these three little words on the web. If you publish interesting, quality content on your website, then the search engines will reward you with high rankings.  It’s as simple as that.

Search engines exist for one purpose – to deliver their users the most relevant, authoritative content quickly, in response to the user’s specified search criteria. That’s why Google, Yahoo and MSN have become huge money making machines – they sift out all the rubbish and provide you with the path to enlightenment within milliseconds. Remember when you had to go to the library to find out stuff? Search engines have changed all that.

It follows then that content that is a) unique b) true c) detailed and d) sought after will eventually find its way to the top of the search engine results pages.

Whilst other SEO strategies, such as inbound linking and keyword tweaking, are important (and shouldn’t be neglected), they are subordinate to the requirement to publish quality content.

There are people out there that will try and convince you otherwise, but ‘content is king’. Everything else is incidental on the web.

It is important to know which pages the search engines have indexed on your site.  Not only does it allow you to tweak your TITLE tags, page copy and metadata, but it also gives you an indication of how your search engine optimisation efforts are going over time and how good your competitors are at SEO too.

To see how many of your pages are indexed in Google, type the following into Google Search:

site:your URL

A search using site:www.boomerangbooks.com returns 7510 results.  My competitors, Dymocks, have over 149,000 results, so I have some work to do.

As you can see, it’s also a useful tool for checking up on your competitors.

Here are some other operators that you can use in Google to obtain information about your listings:

Metadata tags - normally located at the top of your HTML page - contain information about your website that is invisible to the user.  The DESCRIPTION tag provides a description of what that page is about – this tag remains an important indexing variable for the search engines. 

Indeed, whilst the text might not be visible on your own website, some search engines display the DESCRIPTION tag in their search engine results pages (SERPs), so it’s important that this tag exists and contains a good description of the web page.

Some tips:

• Make sure that every page has a unique DESCRIPTION tag, written specifically for that page.
• The tag should be about 140 characters or 20 words in length
• Include keywords in the tag – but don’t repeat terms more than twice
• Use the DESCRIPTION tag to offer keyword variations (eg. if you run a jewellery website, you might include the American spelling of jewelry in the tag) as the tag is not visible to the user – but remember it can often be found in the search engine listing for your site).

Google is the king of the search engines. So when Google offers you a set of webmaster tools to assist you with your listings in Google, you would be silly not to use them, wouldn’t you?

With Google Webmaster Central and Webmaster Tools you can learn how Google ranks websites, how to submit all of your content to Google and how to improve traffic to your site.

Webmaster Central can be found at http://www.google.com/webmasters/. There are a bunch of excellent resources for every webmaster on this page.

Google’s Webmaster Tools can be found at Webmaster Central. These tools can assist you with statistics, diagnostics and management of Google’s indexing of your website, including sitemap submission and reporting.

To get started you will need to specify your website URL and then verify that you are the owner of that site (you will be required to add some code or a file to your website for recognition by Google). From there, you can diagnose how well your site is being indexed by Google, view statistics, learn which sites link to yours, get information about keywords used to find your site, specify sitemaps, and generate a robots.txt indexing file.

Sitemaps are relatively new to the web world. These are XML files that reside on the top level of your domain and which contain a listing of all pages in your site. These files make life easier for Google’s indexing spiders because they tell the spiders where to look and what to index. They are definitely worth setting up and there are a number of tools that can assist you to do so.   Try XML Sitemaps Generator, a server based generator that can be set up to auto-run periodically on your host.

Similarly, the robots.txt file sits at the top level of your website and directs Google’s spiders to indexable content. Google has a robots.txt generator tool here – https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/robotsgen.

Once you have settled on a combination of keywords that you would like to optimise your site for, it is important to ensure that these keywords are represented in different areas on your home page.

Your keywords should appear in the following places:

1. In your domain name, if possible (eg. www.cheap-hotels.com.au) - this is not always possible if you are working with an established domain, but it can help if you are contemplating a new website.

2. In the page URL – if you are trying to optimise a page for ‘canberra hotels’, then you should try and include these terms in the URL: http://www.getaroom.com.au/Canberra-hotels-list.htm

3. In your page TITLE tag – this is the text that appears at the very top left of the web browser when you view a web page – it is considered one of the most important factors in your search engine optimisation efforts, because this is normally the text that appears as the title of your page in the search engine listings.

4. In your page meta DESCRIPTION tag – hidden to the viewer, but important, as this is often the text that appears in the site description in the search engine listings.

5. In your page meta KEYWORDS tag – hidden to the viewer, not overly important, but worth reviewing.

6. In page headings – H1 (and H2, H3 etc.) headline texts are the texts that are written between the <h1>…</h1> tags in the HTML code of a web page. Some search engines give extra relevance to search terms that appear in the headline texts.

7. In the page body text (preferably in the first sentence of the body text and also consider bolding the keywords, if appropriate, as some search engines give greater weight to bold text)

8. In image ALT tags – this is text that is displayed on a website when the image fails to load or if the browser has turned off the view images function.  They are also displayed as a mouseover effect when scrolling over images in Microsoft Internet Explorer.  These tags can have some bearing on search engine listings

9. In on-site links anchor text - this is the anchor text that is used in a hyperlink to point to another page on your own site.  For example, if I had a page on ‘Canberra Hotels’ and I wanted to optimise for those keywords, I would use Canberra Hotels as my anchor text on another page of my website to link to that page.

10. In on-site links URLs – this is the text contained within a URL that points to another page on your own site.  For example, if I had a page on ‘Canberra Hotels’ and I wanted to optimise for those keywords, I would use http://www.getaroom.com.au/canberra-hotels-list.htm as the URL on my website to link to that page.

11. In outbound links anchor text / URL text - whilst less important, some credence is given to anchor text and URL text that links to other websites, although this seems to be a relatively minor factor, and I wouldn’t be providing links to your competitors!

12. In HTML comments – HTML comment tags are “hidden comments” in the HTML code of your web page. They are not visible to the user.

You should ensure that you follow these guidelines when tweaking your on-site keywords:

- CRITICAL – be careful not to include too many instances of the keywords words, as many search engines look unfavourably on sites with high keyword density – they see this as a deliberate strategy to dupe search engines

- Don’t add keywords to headings and body text if they serve to distort the meaning of the page/section – the keywords need to appear naturally in the text, particularly as this text is read by your site visitors.

There are plenty of websites out there that have fancy, all-singing, all-dancing Flash animations as ’splash pages’ to greet the user upon arrival.  The problem is that most users are impatient and, unless it’s a masterpiece, the Flash animation will give them an excuse to leave your site.

Adobe’s popular web animation software powers many big websites around the globe – just take a look at the Nike Plus website for some sexy stuff.  It’s certainly impressive, but it takes time to load and time is one thing that I don’t have….

Flash animations can also confound a user because it adds a layer of complexity to a website - what are all these moving parts, what do I click next, how do I buy, where do I go to get what I want.  Excessive animation will just confuse people and turn them away.

Another consideration is the search engine compatibility of pages that contain Flash and other animation files.  Animation can’t be read by search engine spiders (although I understand that technology is getting better in this area) and the lengthy delays required to download animations will also cause some spiders to reject the page altogether.  Google and others prefer rich, text-based pages, rather than pages chock full of animations, images and non-HTML elements.

So, my advice is to do away with the Flash animations, unless you are trying to sell the fact that you are an animator or video effects specialist.

Remember that old chestnut – KISS – keep it simple stupid.