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Written by Larry Dearing
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Saturday, 10 April 2010 14:37 |
In the first part of this post, we looked at often overlooked "finishing touches" if you will, that can detract from your visitors' experience on your website. A big theme of part 1 was you may only get one change to impress your visitors and convert them to loyal repeat visitors and followers. By the way, if you missed Part 1 you can get it here. Part 2 takes a look at often overlooked items on the backend of your website. Here the theme is more "don't shoot yourself in foot" by not taking care of some easy but important details that can affect how search engines view your site and subsequent ranking.
Are You Using Canonical Redirects on www?
This is simply a choice if you will, of whether you want your website address with or without the "www" to be authoritative for your domain. What does this mean? It's mostly for traffic analysis. Without this choice, traffic to your site with or without the www will be tracked separately as two different websites. Common practice is to redirect, or forward "yourdomain.com" to www.yourdomain.com.
Have You Included "alt text" On All Graphics and Pictures?
Alternate Text, "alt text", is text assigned to a picture of graphic. You've seen them when you drag your mouse over pictures, giving a small description of the object. This is often overlooked, but there are three considerations to always use them. First, if your goal is W3C compliance, they are a must and will report as an error if missing on validation tests. Secondly and most important, if for some reason your picture of graphic is not able to be rendered in a visitor's browser, this alternate text will appear in its place. Thirdly, it is also an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) technique where your alternate text can include key words for your page and be read by the search engines. Remember, search engines can't "read" pictures!
Are You Using SEF URL's?
Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URL’s is another important consideration in launching a website. If you've been wanting to use them, it's a lot easier to do it in the beginning then to migrate later on. Why would you care? Here's the deal. Many dynamic websites use auto generated URL’s as you publish. These URL’s can be very long and seemingly nonsensical. SEF URL’s allow you to assign short real words to your page addresses like “yourdomain.com/blog/features” which can be used along with key words for your site and page. The SEF part comes in the search engines finding meaningful key words in your URL's letting them know exactly what's there.
Are You Using Relevant Page Meta Tags?
This is another "behind the scenes" SEO wonder. Each web page can contain meta tags for page title, description, and key words for your site. By carefully choosing the wording for these tags, search engines can get a better idea of what's on your page. Titles not only look good and are informative to your visitors, but they weigh heavily with search engines. Just as important as the title tags, the description tag allows you to do a short description of your page. Most search engines use this tag to display on their search pages. The key word tag is the less important and many web masters debate just how relevant they still are. To be safe, use them sparingly and accurately for your page content.
Have You Got A Backup Plan?
This seems to be the number one most forgotten or disregarded portion of launching a new website. Most web hosts will make backups of your site, but they are often not daily, and they are actually more for their use in disaster recovery. Consequently the backup plan of your web host may very well not be sufficient for your purposes. Take some time and develop your own strategy of keeping a copy or backup of your site. And by the way, keeping the backup there on your web hosting site may not really be the best place to keep it!
All of these last items are often and easily overlooked. Are you taking care of all of them, some of them, or perhaps none of them? Now is a good time to schedule time to look in to these last bits of polish. You'll draw more attention from the search engines for sure, and by having regular backup strategy and ready to execute restoration plan you'll be positioned well for the inevitable. As always, if you have any questions or are looking for further information feel free to contact us.
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Related:
Is Your Website Really Ready To Launch? - Part 1 |
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