SEO Early On, Part 2

Part 1 was a little bit sparse on actual, actionable advice so I thought I’d start this post out with some fairly simple tips that can do wonders for your rankings.

Clean up the HTML :Cleaning up your HTML can do wonders for your SEO for the simple reason that search engine spiders will only parse so much of a page so reducing the markup in favor of content is wonderful.

Properly structure individual pages :When designing web pages, you should always use HTML structuring to maximum effect by grouping related content together and using your header tags(h1-h6) in the correct order. For example, you should step from h1 to h2 to h3, as opposed to h1 directly to h4. This is for usability purposes in addition to effectively structuring your content.

Properly structure your whole site :This is a slightly more advanced topic as you shouldn’t re-structure your web site without considering the additional ramifications; however, if you haven’t launched your site yet, you can plan the structure of your site such that important pages are never more than 2 clicks from the homepage.

Watch somebody use your site! :While it may seem to be a strange tip, actually watching some of your users navigate their way through your site can give you some great pointers about what might need to be changed. Because Google has enough data about searches, they can also observe users bouncing from your pages and coming right back to the search page so you should make sure that users can fin the content they want easily and this is best done by watching actual users and not making assumptions!

Hopefully these tips are a bit more usable than the last ones! If you have any questions or comments, please share them below!

Continue with Part 3!