Search Engine Optimization

Things to do so Evil Ninja Google finds you. This wizardry is commonly called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The position in the search results is influenced by a wide range of factors, some of them we have impact on, some are easy... others not.

Using meta tags

Meta tags are hidden tags that are displayed in the source code of page but not in body of the page.  

Title

The title tag is one of the most important in SEO. It will be used to present your link in the search results and very much influences the pagerank. Also it gets displayed on top of your brower. The 'title tag' is not necessary the same as the title of your post.

  • Ideally, your title should contain between 10 and 70 characters (spaces included). 
  • Make sure your title is explicit and contains your most important keywords.
  • Be sure that each page has a unique title.

Description

Meta descriptions allow you to influence how your web pages are described and displayed in search results.

  • Ideally, your meta description should contain between 70 and 160 characters. 
  • Ensure that your meta description is explicit and contains your most important keywords . 
  • Also be sure that each page has a unique meta description.

Keywords

Meta keywords is used to indicate keywords that are supposedly relevant to your website's content. However, because search engine spammers have abused this tag, it provides little to no benefit to your search rankings. But of course it can still be used.

Using headers

It is always good to have a good text structure. Translated to SEO this means a page can only have one H1 or Heading 1 tag. This can be followed by h2 tags and so on. Again adding important keywords to these tags helps improve the pageranks.

Alt-tags

When adding images, please make sure your image has a descriptive alt-tag. Robots and blind people can't see what is on an image and use this tag. Also this is required to produce standards compliant pages which in itself improves ranking.