Is your site SEO friendly?

Finding the right online website software for your small business can be a pain and time-consuming exercise.

Obvious factors that come into your search criteria might include: ease of use, cost, security, speed and quality of support.

But what about marketing?  Have you considered:

1. How search engine friendly will my website be if I use a particular online software?
2. How easy it is to optimise my online business to get the best out of my web presence and so people can find my business?

There are loads of great seo tools and resources around (and we will be providing some too in this blog and on our website) and you’ve probably read a lot of them and have a good idea on what to do, or can get around to reading them later.

But, when it comes to implementing these seo bits, what do you need your online website software to help you do out of the box?

Can you control page addresses?

URLs (Page addresses – the exact reference to a page on a website) are pretty important and often ignored by small businesses setting up their website.

For example, the link to this blog post is http://www.latteperday.com/blog/?p=31 and http://www.latteperday.com/blog/is-your-site-seo-friendly/

Which do you think is better?

So many small businesses use the first style.  This is hard for users to remember, type in or even recognise when they look through their bookmarks that they have saved.  You want people to instantly recognise your business when they look through their bookmarks!

But, also, it isn’t very good for search engines either.  They can’t get much info about the page from the URL if it is just a random number like “31″.

Creating a relevant, keyword-rich URL is one of the best things you can do for SEO.  It is SEO-friendly and very important.

Is the site built using HTML and CSS?

This one is a bit more geeky and something you may not know much about but just good to be aware of when making decisions about building your business online and choosing the right software company.

Search engines have a much better time crawling through standards-based, semantic HTML (the code used to create this web page for example) when looking for keywords, meta tags, and content.  The CSS just adds styles to the page such as colour, logos, and adjusts how the site looks.  By keeping this CSS in a separate file, it keeps the web page code light on its feet.

Some site packages may force you to use a not so compliant markup language such as tables! Tables can be bad for a whole bunch of reasons.

Others create pages in Flash which is isn’t always great either and will annoy Steve Jobs.  Flash has it’s place and is great for banners or slideshows – but we prefer more standard compliant ways of creating those kind of elements too, that work on all the best browsers, iPads, iPhones etc.

Some online web software also may force you to create a site with visual page-creation tools.

But all of these can be difficult or unreadable to search engines, as well as cause problems with mobile devices, speed of the site, people who use screen readers and also make it much harder to make visual and background content updates to your site on an ongoing basis.

Will your website use fast and reliable hosting?

Site speed is not just important for users (deciding if they hit the back button or not in under a second) but  higher loading time can also result in lower SEO rankings. It’s important for SEO purposes that your website uses quality, fast and reliable hosting.

Hosting can become an issue with free or low-cost services. Users are often all put on small servers that are weighted to capacity.  This provides a poor service to customers but also really effects the speeds and uptime of their websites.

High quality hosting (often known as dedicated hosting) and services are available, but the cost can be high for a small business owner.

Other things you may wish to consider

• Does your website have Google analytics built in so that you can track visitors to the site?
• Can you add ALT and description tags to images (these add more information to images for search engines and screen readers – often appear when you hover over an image with your mouse)
• Can you easily add a 301 redirect if you move some content (Geek alert! 301 is just the right way to redirect to web pages that have been moved whilst preserving search engine rankings. Often difficult or technical to implement so would be good to know if an easy way is built into your web package as standard)
• Does your site store CSS and other scripts in the right place or is it all in each individual page making the page load time heavy?
• Does your website package support and automatically create the XML and user-friendly sitemaps? (Matt Cutts from Google always says that this is essential for Google and especially for different store locations as we mentioned here)
• Can you create and edit the robots.txt if you want to? (this allows you to tell Google’s robots, and those of other search engines, which pages to crawl, which are more important, which you don’t want to appear in search results etc)
• Can you get page-level control over your META description and keyword fields or is it only at the site level? (The description tag is really key as it is the couple of sentences that appear in the search results and often “persuades” users to click on your link or not when doing a search. If you can’t edit this, you’re already losing the chance to bring in visitors and telling the search engines and humans what the page is about and how relevant it could be to them).

A little sneak preview

You may have guest it, but the latteperday online website software includes all of these features as standard out of the box.

For the geeky ones, no worries, we’ve got you covered.

Most of these ones happen in the background so that you don’t need to worry about implementing them.  But it’s good for you to know that they are in place and your site is doing its best to be the most accessible that it can to users and search engines.

SEO-friendly sites are key for your small business and we can help by giving you one.

In terms of cost and quality, we are going to give our customers these SEO features, along with high quality hosting and a bunch of even more really user-friendly features, all for the price of purchasing just high quality hosting elsewhere.

Cost Hint = latteperday – it’s in the name

If you have any questions about SEO and how easy it is to optimise your site using latteperday.com then please get in touch with us or use the comment space below.

Photo by D Sharon Pruitt