Setting up Your Site for SEO – The First Steps
I’ve been writing a lot of articles regarding CSS recently so I thought I would mix it up by talking briefly about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). There’s a wealth of information out there giving away tips and strategies on how to rank well on search engines, but most jump straight into the “optimizing” portion of the formula.
What I would like to focus on today is the initial setup and technical aspects before even starting to optimize your site. What are the first steps? Let’s go over a few fundamentals of setting up your site.
Getting a Good Domain Name
Getting a good domain is getting harder and harder these days with millions of domains out there taken. One thing you have to consider is trying to figure out what direction you’re trying to take your site/company.
If you are striving for a brand image, then obviously your company name should be the domain name. But on the other hand, if you are trying to start up a site whether it’s an ecommerce site or a community site that you don’t necessarily need to associate with a brand, then you should be choosing a domain name with the keyword you are after. Domain Name Generators and Tools
- www.makewords.com
- www.psychicwhois.com
- www.domize.com
- www.bustaname.com
- www.suggest.name
- www.instantdomainsearch.com
Setting up a 301 Redirect to Avoid Canonicalization
One of the many things search engines don’t like is duplicate content. Having www vs. non-www. (known as Canonicalization by Google) can at times confuse search engines and it may penalize your site for duplicate content. You can avoid this issue by creating a .htaccess file to redirect the one you choose not to use. Include the following code into your .htaccess file. * Note that the .htaccess file should be located in the site’s main directory.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.your_domain.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.your_domain.com/$1 [R=301]
To learn more about this, check out Matt Cutt’s article.
Setting up Your Site Map
In its simplest terms, a Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that search engines know about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by the robot’s normal crawling process. You can use this nifty tool to generate a sitemap for you within seconds. »Download Site Map Generator
Setting up Robots.txt
Web Robots (also known as Web Wanderers, Crawlers, or Spiders), are programs that traverse the Web automatically. Search engines such as Google use them to index the web content. Web site owners use the /robots.txt file to give instructions about their site to web robots; this is called The Robots Exclusion Protocol. Although this may not really help your ranking, it’s a good practice to get familiar with. Learn more about robots.txt
Setting up Analytics to Monitor Your Keywords and Traffic
One of the best free online tools out there is Google Analytics. It not only allows you to monitor your traffic, but you are also able to see which keywords people searched to get to your site. Once your site starts picking up in search, this will be a handy tool to analyze your keywords to see which one is working best for you.
Setting up Google Webmasters Tools
The Google Webmasters Tool improve your site’s visibility in Google search results. It provides you with an easy way to make your site more Google-friendly. They can show you Google’s view of your site, help you diagnose problems, and let you share info with Google to help improve your site’s visibility in their search results. It’s very simple to set up!
Conclusion
These are the basics that you should probably implement in each of your sites. Optimizing for search engines can be a frustrating at times, but with enough patience and the right strategies, there is no body stopping you from ranking high in your keywords. For more tips on SEO, check out my previous article regarding SEO for Local Search. If you have some things you would like to add on to this list, please do!
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Author Bio
My name is Soh Tanaka and I am a Los Angeles based designer/front-end developer specializing in CSS driven web design with an emphasis on usability and search engine optimization. I also run a CSS Gallery which is updated daily with the best CSS websites from around the world. Come check it out!
You can learn more about me or 
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+ Add Comment29 Peeps Have Spoken Their Minds...
I like this post..thanks for the write up…will definitely bookmark it…
Well i just launched my love blog – Cupid Blogger Dot Com last week…the traffic is getting heavy after i promote the blog over social media like facebook and SEO as well..About 20% of my traffic are from search engines…looking forward to increase to 40% by end of this month…
Do check out my blog…Cheers
short and sweet.
Looks great!
I haven’t had that much experience with SEO yet. I’m going to start learning it in about 2 weeks though. Then I’ll have another detailed look in this. It seems pretty simple.
Thanks,
Martin
Very useful! This is perfect for someone thinking of getting their site up and running.
Very useful, especially the robots.txt file. Thanks for this.
nice.
Very useful article, I need to brush up on my SEO knowledge…
Great site, bro! Quick things: This is more SEM than SEO, where SEM falls on external site modifications and SEO is albeit more focused on internal site construction, such as keyword/keyphrase research and placement, URL naming conventions, meta tags, alt and title phrases, keyword density and such. Nonetheless, the article is useful for beginners.
Google has an SEO starter guide and so does SEOmoz
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet
http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf
:)
David, thank you for that info! I just took a look at those links too and they are very helpful, awesome!:-D
Hey no problem! Love to help out in any way.
David,
Those are some really good links and I especially like the SEO cheat sheet. I will have to make sure and link to them from my blog.
As for SEO vs SEM, I don’t think the lines are so easily blurred.
Entrepreneur.com certainly includes inbound links as part of SEO:
1. Ask relevant sites to link to your site. In the past, scoring a high ranking with a search engine was all about positioning your keywords in “prime real estate” positions in your text and site coding. All that has changed, however, because these days, links are king.
and further on down:
4. Submit your site to online directories. Be sure to submit your site to important directories such as Yahoo!, the Open Directory Project and About.com, as well as smaller directories. Your listing on these directories will help your ranking with the major search engines.
http://www.entrepreneur.com/encyclopedia/term/82600.html
Here is part of Brick Marketing’s explanation of SEO:
To achieve this, an Internet marketing advisor will employ a combination of the following SEO practices and more:
* An SEO Strategy – SEO analysis of your site conducted by an experienced SEO advisor to identify opportunities for improvement and devise a comprehensive approach that will get results.
* Keyword Research – Thorough research of your industry and identification of which keywords and phrases will achieve the best results.
* SEO Copywriting – Content optimization using your keywords and phrases in the pages of your site to achieve higher ranking.
* Link Building – The process of creating inbound links to your website which allows your site to achieve a higher ranking.
http://www.brickmarketing.com/define-search-engine-optimization.htm
Of course, there are no doubt other definitions that would contradict these. But the point is, there is much overlap and the semantic distinction is far from obvious.
Chris, Yes SEO and SEM are definitely not as easily defined as you stated, but the differences that I have seen and encountered (not just on my experience, btw) is that SEM is the global marketing initiatives related to search engines, which in this case includes SEO and PPC. Organic optimization is typically defined and universally recognized as the term “SEO.” It plays a vital role in the ad campaign creation in PPC world but is also a world in and of itself.
But you are right in that there are semantic distinctions that separate the two or include the two together. Maybe the blurred line is within the methods of SEO/SEM you are doing. But what do I know? ;)
Hi David,
Thanks for the insightful response. I am curious to know more about these differences you’ve encountered. How does one decide that “global marketing initiatives” don’t fit within the parameters of SEO? Everything about SEO has a marketing aspect to it. I can see how not all SEM is SEO, but one can reasonably argue that all SEO is SEM.
If you break down the term search engine optimization, it’s clear the optimization is in reference to the search engine itself. So I’m not really sure how one would decide that SEO is specific to on-page optimization, when both on and off page optimization affect the search engine’s results.
GOOD POINT, Chris! Excellent questions. Man you got me stumped for a bit! Going back to the original post, the comment I made about the SEM being an external modifications was based on what was used as examples on this article: 301s, sitemaps, robots, analytics, etc. While these do affect search engine results, these mostly rely off-page and do not necessarily involve constant on-page optimization (i.e. restructuring keywords and keyword density in content development, revamping meta tags, etc).
The global marketing initiatives I mentioned was merely to build up on the importance of SEO and PPC within the SEM world. Yes, I agree that practically all of SEO is SEM and not vice versa (and I’m glad you picked up on that. A lot of SEO peeps I have worked with still struggle with that basic foundation).
Man, we can definitely have some great conversations on this topic. Unfortunately, I must take myself out of work and go home!
Great points Dave! Thanks for the discussion. It’s always fun to dive into the semantics of this largely inexact science with someone else who understands it.
Haha this was a nice exchange, thanks fellas for your info! *Takes notes
No, thank you Soh for letting us discuss! [Shameless promotion on my part coming right about... now!] I would love to have you guys on my Twitter, follow me on blog, LinkedIn, or other communications you wish. It would be great to have you guys on board! Click on my name and you’ll find how to get a hold of me then :)
Nice Point.Thank. Short and sweet
very informative article, step by step to applying of remarkable seo, this hardly good for beginner like me. thank for it
best..
tukang nggame
now I can setting my site
Good SEO starter guide! These basic steps can get your website more SEO-friendly.
Nice Point.Thank so much
Very nice tips! I have a question, how do you setup 301 redirect on IIS?
wow, this is cool, even addresses the domain name right from the start. though for this part, i feel it’s not easy to get a good domain. :)
it’s really very goooooood;)
It’s a great information
nice tut,thanks
Thank you for this post, it really helped me.
Thank you for publishing this guide. It’s an useful guide for a beginner like me so I’ve bookmarked this.
For more information there is a section in Google Webmaster Tools where you can generate a robots.txt file and test it to see if it works as intended (testing is only intended for testing with Googlebot) which is handy for beginners who want to deny access to specific directories and files.
More information can be found at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449.
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