Script: Welcome to this weeks SEO Video Blog, we often use the term ‘SEO architecture’ used in our video blogs and throughout the SEO industry.

We believe that it is important to ensure the sites architecture clearly reinforces your search engine optimisation strategy.

Good site architecture allows the search engine crawl bots to easily index your site and prioritise content within your website.

The process is relatively simple, Nick has put together a tutorial which explains the way in which we believe you should approach the development of a website when considering SEO.

Ill show a couple of examples, starting with a small website that Creare built for elite windows. http://www.elitewindows.info/

You can see the range of products and services they offer from their navigation, the URL then reinforces this principle.

You can see that if we click through to the windows page, that the URL changes to http://www.elitewindows.info/windows.php. The same principle applies to the doors, conversatories and roofing product pages.

The optimisation then is consistent with this. If we query ‘Front Doors Reading’ which is optimised on the doors.php page we can see that the search result is the individual product page and that Google has highlighted and Identified the doors.php extension.

The second example i’ll use is a client called MR fire and security, http://www.mrfsgroup.com/. You can see we are in the /security-products/ section of the website.

All the products that MRFS supply are then organised with keyword rich file names. For examples the CCTV section is simply /cctv.php. The Fire Alarms page is simply /fire-alarms.php and so on…

The best advice we can give is if you have a large website and lots of products and services, treat you architecture like an eCommerce website.

Organised /category/sub-category/product-name.php this will allow Google to easily identify what each service and product relates too and ensure that they perform on a individual basis.

With large sites it is also recommended to use bread crumb trails, this helps usability and Google can return the breadcrumb results in the SERP.

You can see if we query ‘Creare Design Portfolio’ the location of the page is shown in a inline breadcrumb trail.

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=creare+design+portfolio&aq=f&aqi=g2&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&fp=3bb5f9b520ad2ad3

We hope this has been of some help, always remember to correctly use sitemaps to help crawl bots index all of the content on your website.

Check out the video blog we did covering HTML and XML sitemaps for more information.

Also we have also re-designed the Creare Communications blog at www.crearecommunications.co.uk/seo-blog/ so take a look, we would appreciate any feedback.

Thanks for watching please leave any questions of comments on the youtube channel or supporting blog post.

This is the core of good search engine optimisation. You can have as many links as you like but unless your site is built with the search engines in mind, your site will never reach it’s potential within the search results.

Ensure that the technical on-site factors are well optimised. These are:

* File names
* Title tags
* Meta description tags
* Meta keywords tags

By doing this you are giving your site a helping hand from the very start of your SEO campaign.

You should also make good use of:

* Header tags
* Alt image tags
* Internal Linking

This will support your ongoing optimisation efforts. Whilst doing this make sure that you at least try to adhere to the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium, as this will ensure your site is compatible across all the major web browsers.

File names

Choose correct file names for the pages within your site, as beside from the domain name this is the first thing that a search engine robot will discover when spidering through your site. Each page within your site is a different file, these can be written in HTML, PHP, ASP or any other web programming language. The file names should be a description of what the page is about, for example if the page is about search engine optimisation you may choose to call the file name ‘search-engine-optimisation.html’ or ‘searchengineoptimisation.html’ as this will give the search engines a clue, before they even open the file, as to what the page is about.

From an organisational point of view this also makes sense – if you have a site with hundreds of pages then how are you ever going to know what is in each page, if the file names are generic like, page1.html, page2html, and so on? It would be an incredibly difficult task to edit and update those pages.

Title Tags

The title tag is quite possibly the most important thing for you to consider when optimising your web pages for particular keywords. Search engines use the title tag text to determine what the page is about. The title tag is also the clickable link that typically appears on the search engine results page when your site appears on the rankings. For this reason it is very important that you not only take the search engine robots into consideration but also your human visitors too (which is after all who your site is intended for, right?).

You should limit your title tag to around 65 characters or fewer, as the search engines do not display more than this. As the title tag is shown to the user in the search engine results page you should try to make it compelling for searchers, but also keyword rich, which can be quite a difficult task. Another thing to consider is that your title tag should be closely related to the file name, as this reinforces what the page is about.

Meta Description Tags

Like the title tag, the Meta description tag is displayed on the search engine results page. The Meta description tag should contain a brief description of what your web page is about. In the past the Meta description tag has been used to stuff keywords in an attempt to trick the search engines into believing the page is more relevant than it really is. For this reason the search engines have advanced their ranking algorithms to such an extent that they don’t pay as much attention to Meta description tags as they once did. However, as the human visitors still see the meta description tag it is vitally important that you write it in a few compelling sentences to describe the page. Make sure the description is interesting enough for a potential site visitor to click on your link. As with the title tag your Meta description tag should be unique to each page to avoid duplicate content.

Meta Keywords Tags

This is now considered to be a largely redundant tag in optimisation. That is not to say you shouldn’t utilise it, as there is no knowing what benefits it may have in the future. The keyword description tag contains a list of keywords or phrases separated by commas, and should describe the subject matter of that particular page. Don’t be tempted to stuff as many keywords in there as possible as this can be seen as spamming by the search engines and your site will be penalised. Additionally, ensure each description tag is unique for each page.

Header Tags

HTML header tags can be used to apply significance to keywords or phrases within a webpage. By placing a selection of text within a header tag you are telling the search engine spiders that the text is of a certain level of importance. Search engine ranking algorithms place emphasis on header tag text when determining where the page should be ranked. The use of header tags is standard practice and should be viewed as a best-practice starting point. Header tags are organised in preset levels of importance, from h1 through to h6. Header tags can be used to organise the content of your webpage in hierarchical topics and subtopics. Don’t expect drastic increases in your rankings for keywords and phrases highlighted in header tags, but do try to use them wherever possible in your webpage wherever possible. This provides a service for both the search engines and your human visitors as it gives a visual emphasis of the importance of certain topics within your webpage.

Alt Image Tags

Some of your visitors cannot see images within your pages, so it is vitally important that you provide suitable alternative text for images. Search engine robots cannot see images either, and alt tags ensure that the robots understand what the image is about. Don’t be tempted to fill your alt tags with unnecessary keywords as they form a vital part of some visitors’ experience on your site. Those who use screen readers for example don’t want or need to hear a long list of spammy keywords every time they come across an image. You can use keywords if they are relevant to the image, and describe it correctly. Make sure that your alt tags make sense to a human before you publish them, as they are important for some web users.

Internal Linking

You should create an internal linking structure that allows search engine spiders and human visitors alike to navigate your site easily and quickly. Search engines use links to navigate the Internet, just like a human does. Although it can be difficult to control the links from outside your own website you can easily control the internal linking within your site. This may be a basic task, but it can be extremely influential to your overall search engine rankings. You should always ensure the link text (called anchor text) is descriptive. Use your keywords with anchor text and this will give the search engine robots a clue as to what the page is about.

Over the past couple of weeks, we are Creare have realised the importance of having a disabled friendly website. We wanted all of our company sites and customers sites to be accessible to all types of users.

So where do you start?

The first thing we thought of was the size of the text, we currently have size 12px, but this can easily be increased by using your command button plus the + & - on your keyboard.

PC - ctrl + or ctrl -

MAC - cmd + or cmd -

We then thought for the visually impaired audio would be an excellent idea, we used www.talkr.com to integrate an automated audio podcast into our news post, which is click-able at the bottom of this post.

We were so happy with this that we found a way of integrating a similar method onto the home page, search engine optimisation page and other services pages. This means from anywhere on the Creare Communications site site you can listen to the content via audio.

Less computer Literate.

It is good practice to ensure that the usability of your site is well designed, we made sure that our site has clearly labeled navigations, large heading and obvious ways of navigating throughout the site. Obvious but important techniques

If you would like to contact Creare regarding disabled friendly websites or search engine friendly websites please call one of the numbers on the top banner.