SEO Musings

A few weeks ago I attended a meeting with a client about the search engine optimisation (SEO) for their website.

I knew some of what they said but there were a few aspects I hadn't contemplated for.

I know that URL Rewriting is a good thing although I'm yet to establish exactly what the best format of a URL actually is. I need to research this for another client soon so hopefully I will come up with a plan. I did find out that hyphens should separate words rather than having them all together (i.e. this-page.aspx rather than thispage.aspx)

Having links inter-linking between the site is also a good thing. So text on the home page could have links within it to pages within the site - then users can navigate without having to only use the menu bar.

Breadcrumbs - I'm not sure if this is good for SEO but it is probably very good for site users to have an idea of where they are currently navigated.

In terms of CSS I had tended to put the odd one or two styles within the actual HTML page but this should all be put in external style sheets - that way robots crawling the site have less text to actually crawl to find the good content.

Error pages should also be more user friendly to the user.

I know some of the above are pretty obvious now they are written down but they are just some things I had never contemplated previously.

I also know the above doesn't even begin to cover SEO in full but I'm hoping by posting this, it will remind me to improve my site building.