Recently I spend quite some time on SEO (Search Engine Optimization), in other words, redesining your site in such a way that it can best be found by search engines. And it is still not finished, but I have come far. What caused a lot of hassle was to start using so called 'friendly urls'.
Friendly urls means that pages on the website can be accessed by readable and easy to understand urls. This means no urls with parameters and if possible with the subject of the page mentioned in the url. The last part is also handy when viewing statistics of your website. The friendly urls show up in there, which allows for easier recognition of the pages users visited.
But the friendly urls are just 1 part of SEO. It all is about the meaning of a page on your website. If a page is meaningless, the chance is that a search engine will bypass it. And to make it meaningfull the page has to abide to a lot of requirements. There are too many to mention, but here are a few:
- The page needs to have a title and a good meta tag description, that say something about the content of the page
- A page needs to contain a structure like 'h1', 'h2', 'h3', etc.
- A website needs a clear sitemap and also a sitemap in XML format that contains all the, for search engines important urls on your website
- The HTML of the page needs to ne conform the W3C standards
And I can continue like this, but off course there are loads of handy tools that can do the job and advise you what's not correct on your site according to SEO. With the use of these tools you can completely finetune your site and get it conform SEO. The tools also advise you on the performance of your site, which is also of importance. A slow page or website will be seen by search engines as not relevant.
In order to optimize my website I used a couple of tools and they helped me a lot:
So what did I already change to my website? Well, the following requirements:
- Friendly urls with the use of the IIS 7 URL Rewrite plug-in
- Added alt tags to all images
- I put the most important content of a page to the top in the HTML code
- I updated all the title and meta tag description content
Off course this is by far not everything. You can spend loads of time on it in order to reach a 100% score. That's not necessary either, it's an advise. At the moment my website reaches a score of 36% at Powermapper where 0% is the best score.
Scott Guthrie of Microsoft published a couple of interesting articles on his blog about the IIS URL Rewrite plug-in used for creating friendly urls: