SEO tips and help

Hello, could some of you SEO experts give me a simple run down on the best ways to make your sites SEO? Does it have to cost a lot of money for google ranking and what tools or tips do you use/follow/recommend?

Thanks

Here’s a great series of articles being written right now. It’s not about magic or black hat tricks, but work and effort.

(No affiliation, just like the info which is mostly right on I think...)

http://seoinpractice.com/

I am no SEO

Have lots of good content, descriptive title tags highlighting keywords for each page, use markup to call attention to headers (h1,h2,h3...), have a site map (both xml and html), get people to link to you, and pray

Does it have to cost a lot of money for google ranking and what tools or tips do you use/follow/recommend?

For industry specific stuff you need to do a lot more research and planning, and it can be costly or time consuming (depending on how competitive the industry is).

These are some stuff that I have bookmarked:
http://www.seomoz.org/toolbox --> nice set of free tools
http://www.seotoolset.com/tools/index.html --> great stuff with a free tool set as well
AdWords keyword tool
Site Point’s SEO FAQ

The SEO Moz blog is great along with HighRankings.com and Dave Naylor’s Blog. SEO is not an end but a process; hence: optimization. There are lots of snake oil salespeople and many voodoo practitioners. Keywords, URL structure, Markup ratios, tracking, copywriting are all part of the game.

My personal theory is to focus on keywords, markup cleanly and ensure the copy doesn’t hurt ranking BUT don’t put all your eggs in the SEO basket. Building a website success is marketing and marketing requires multi faceted actions to an end or set of ends.

Traffic quantity is almost always trumped by quality now. Once it was a chief goal to get as many "eyeballs" on a site as possible but really you want to find leads and turn them into prospects and CONVERT them into a customer. I have a client site that gets few unique visitors but the conversion rates are high because the keywords are self filtering and only people searching for limited keywords will find them. One could argue that adding broader search terms would increase traffic and while that is true just as many will likely fail to convert and or just leave.

Needless to say website marketing is a complex organism and not the build-it-optimize-it:done object that some like to present it as. Business is about small adjustments consistently over time and (sometimes large radical ones too).

I want to cover the fundamentals of a well produced website from the CMS, design and to what the customer doesn’t see which is how google etc find your site.

What I have been following is a structure with the following but I would like some input to make sure I am doing what is expected.

Using MODx as the framework
Coding the site to XHTML Strict (validated)
Using CSS to control the layout etc (validated)
Using MODx to create the XML and registering that XML with Google.
Signing a site up to Google Analytic and embedding the JS in the site.
Website submission.

An example for my meta tags

<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-uk" />
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />
<meta name="revisit-after" content="2" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<meta name="keywords" content="Web designs, Edinburgh, Edinburgh custom web development, web edinburgh, Edinburgh website, Scotland web designs, web development" />
<meta name="description" content="Custom web design and development, logo and graphic design suited to your needs" />
<meta name="abstract" content="Custom web design and development in Edinburgh" />
<meta name="author" content="Ross S" />
<meta name="copyright" content="Copyright (c) 2008 Ross S All rights reserved." />

Using Wayfinder to create an HTML styled sitemap.

What more should I include as standard? I want to make sure that I am giving a professional service... I know it’s quite a hard subject to say exactly what to give but what standards do you follow yourself? I’m sure you understand what I am getting at... I want to be seen to be a good designer.

don’t get too bogged down in meta tags, its the page design and content that is most important. Google wont read the keywords, but does read the description tag.

When you design your site have the content as close to the <body> tag as possible, so if you have a massive menu put that code after the content.

Sign up for a google sitemap account, and submit your sitemap, after a while it will tell you if anything is wrong with the page content.

Most important part of a page

Page Title
Meta Description
Your content

One of my sites does actually have a indepth menu... It’s at the very top of the site so in theory I could put it at the bottom of my page and add position:absolute to the div to put it back to the top. Would that be something that would be counted as a work around to menus on a site?

yes but make sure you test it in the major browsers, content first in the source in my view is always best, if you want an improvement in seo, but its only part of the story, what you do off your site is really important i.e link building.

If you want more info google "css content first" lots of posts on the subject

There have been lots of posts about content first but the fact of the matter I’ve read no empirical studies that show differences between the indexing of sites with crazy (read bad IA) menu structure at the top of the document over sites that have none. I’d rather see you spend more time trying to organize a site to not use a vast and deep dropdown structure.

I do understand what you are doing though and that is to create a competitive edge with your offering by giving clients top quality SEO sites using only the best practices. Personally, I’d say start reading Dave Naylor, HighRankings Advisor and SEOMOz and come to your own conclusions.

I’m convinced that it does benefit, I once did this to a site that had no pagerank at all and could not be found for their own company name, I tweaked the css and put the content right under the <body> tag, a few weeks later they were no.1 for their company name (if only it was that easy for other terms)

I have to stress that their company name was not a competitive term at all, I also have to say you have a fair point. With the right keywords on inbound links you can get almost any site higher in the rankings. In the past when I was a freelance web designer, quite a few of the better ranking sites, used content first technique - its where I first noticed it.

Look at this site www.mackins.co.uk a few years back he was top on google for uk web design, he has only recently been knocked off the top spot because everyone was looking at his source code and people have targeted his keywords, but again its not 100% proof. The irony, I think its ironic is that his site looks nasty in design terms.