When web developers create a new site, or approach a site redesign, they seldom do so from the perspective of search engine optimisation (SEO). Instead, their goal is to inject a high level of aesthetic appeal. Flash videos and engaging images take precedence over a site architecture designed for easy search engine indexing and competitive organic ranking. Indeed, it is a rare developer who considers SEO a priority. The challenge is that the development process can cause enormous problems with regard to a website's ability to rank well. Because search engine optimisation is a core marketing strategy, these problems often have a severe impact on a site's profitability. With this in mind, here are 13 SEO techniques every web developer should integrate into a site's design: #1 - Streamline Your Code Many web developers create attractive sites, but the underlying code they use is staggeringly heavy. Search engine spiders enjoy efficient, light code. They can crawl it more quickly and index it more accurately. Not only does that lead to higher organic rankings for a site's target keywords, but it's also easier to maintain those rankings. It's worth noting that clean code does not hamper a web developer's design creativity. It merely streamlines a page's structure. For example, an external CSS file can accomplish the same thing as a heavy HTML table, but it does so with far less code. #2 - Choose One Main Keyword For Each Page For optimal search engine optimisation, each page should be designed to focus upon one main keyword. The content, tags, and surrounding code on the page should be developed to emphasize that keyword. Two or three secondary keywords can be used to add thematic support, but the main keyword should be the priority. #3 - Place Keywords In Title Tags Organic search algorithms rely heavily on page titles to determine the thematic relevance of a page's topic to a searcher's query. If all pages within a site's architecture have similar title tags, that will have a negative influence on each page's respective ability to rank competitively. Each page should have a unique title that includes its primary keyword. Furthermore, that keyword should be placed as closely as possible at the beginning of the title. #4 - Use "Friendly" URLs A site's URL structure plays a key role in supporting - or hampering - the owner's SEO efforts. Web developers will often design a site with URLs that are unfriendly to search engine spiders. For example, pages might look like the following: domain.com/?page24&num=4197&fs=thur34&q=dr476 While spiders can crawl such URLs, their ability to index them properly is limited. What's more, the above URL does little to support the page's main keyword. If a page is focused on "running shoes," the following URL would be far more search engine "friendly": domain.com/running-shoes/. Search algorithms can identify keywords within an URL; they are used to further identify thematic relevance to se ...

Published: July 6, 2009 Peter is a Google's Product Manager for Image Search. Prior to Google Peter was at Ask.com working on Search Quality. Prior to Ask Peter worked as an engineer at Oracle where he enabled regular expression support in SQL and developed a migration solution to convert databases to Unicode, both equally challenging and rewarding projects. Peter also worked with Jonathan Gennick and came up with a nifty book on Oracle Regular Expressions . Interview Transcript Eric Enge: What are some of the basic on page things that you can do to optimize your image search results? Peter Linsley: There are a lot of best practices that we can touch upon, but I think I'd like to start off by describing the problem that image search engines in particular have. If you think about most web documents, they are to a certain extent structured data that we can crawl easily. The title and body of the page communicate a lot to the search engine. Think of a Wikipedia article titled "History of United States," which describes very accurately what you are about to read in the body of the page. The other thing that is key with web search is that they have things like backlinks and anchor text where you can get a read on what other people say about something in particular, in this case a Wikipedia page. When it comes to images, those signals are not always available. The crawler will have to look through the HTML, and it will find an image source tag. That's pretty much all it knows about the image except for the alt text, which is something you can put into the image tag. The best thing to do with that is to describe what is in the image as efficiently as possible. This has value in a lot of ways. I was on a local connection the other day, and as I was looking at a page for about 3 or 4 seconds as an image loaded up, and all I could see was the alt text. If you have images turned off or if you are visually impaired, or are using a text browser like the Lynx browser, the alt text is extremely valuable. In addition, if you hover your mouse over the image on most browsers, you can see the alt text. We like it because users can see it and it brings them value. I think a good practice is to use the alt text to describe what you can see in the image, and you can use that same text elsewhere on the page. It could be the title of the image or part of a caption. Getting back to how a crawler looks through a page, we see this image tag and we can see the alt text, but of course it doesn't say everything about the image that it possibly can. In Flickr's case, people will highlight parts of the image, and say something about a particular part of the image, but none of this is structured, and it's not really machine readable. We have to guess and also look at what text we believe can be attributed with that particular image on the HTML page. Another good, simple practice is making the title, description or caption of the image obv ...

http://www.lockergnome.com/net/2011/03/31/how-to-use-google-page-speed-online-to-speed-up-your-website/ Google quietly launched another lab today following yesterday’s release of the new Google +1 button, which allows Google users to share and recommend search results. To help blog owners and Web masters understand their own search rankings, Google now features a new lab called Page Speed Online. Page Speed Online provides a Page Speed Score and suggestions to implement to bring that score up. Having a high Page Speed Score is important because your Web site’s page load time is a critical component of your ranking in Google search results. Google provides Page Speed Scores and analysis for not only the desktop version of your Web site, but the mobile version of your Web site, too. These scores can drastically vary, as your Web site might not be optimized properly for mobile browsers. Google provides High, Medium and Low priority suggestions for each version of yours Web site, and Google’s Page Speed Online suggestions might include the following: High : Leverage browser caching Medium : Minimize redirects Low : Minify CSS The only problem with the Page Speed Online lab is that you may find that your Page Speed score may vary drastically each time you revisit it to check your score. I checked my personal blog’s Page Speed Score twice, only minutes apart, and the score dropped from a 91 to an 83. Could this be an indicator of how Google actually (and haphazardly?) works? Or is this lab just still too new to expect stability? Even though Google’s new lab may potentially have some quirks, the Page Speed Online lab is still a great tool to get recommendations from Google to improve the function and page speed of your Web site. If you have ever asked yourself “Why is my Web site slow?” You may want to use this tool to see your personal recommendations from Google to improve your own search rankings. Here’s how to use Google’s new Page Speed Online tool: Visit the Page Speed Online Lab Type in your web page URL Select whether you want to “Get desktop suggestions” or “Get mobile suggestions” for your Web site from the drop down menu. ...