Search engine optimization (SEO) best practices

An SEO refresher

• Websites should be written for people, with a focus on being clear and user friendly – know your audience and write to them
• Where feasible, keywords should be included in: 
• page titles, headings (h1,h2,h3), and emphasis
• only the first 65-75 characters of a title tag display in the search results - this is also the general limit allowed by most social media sites.
• Headings should be 65 characters max. (long headings can be interpreted as spam by Google)
• Bolding or italicizing keywords can also aid search engines to know what words are important – but emphasis must be appropriate, i.e. done for a reason the reader understands
  within content, especially within the first paragraph (have about 300 words per page)
• Link content (contextual links), including navigation/menu items and anchors

Search engines also look at:

• Age of site (how long has it been in existence, is it a credible source of information on that keyword)
• Neighbourhood – who is linking to your site and where is your site linking to (is there a high degree of relevance especially for the keyword) (also called backlinks)
• Having a blog that you link to and links back with relevant links can support better results
• Create content that is of high valuable so people will share it and link to it
• Search on Google for allintitle:resources directory – and find resources directories that you can approach to link to you
• Note: bad links are pages that only contain links and no content

• Fresh content – frequently update your content (stale content will get pushed down in the results)
  URLs – should be readable and the shorter the better (115 characters max as shorter urls have higher click throughs)
• Meta data -  description (up to 150 characters including spaces),  page title, ALT (less than 65 characters incl spaces), tags
• Use questions in subheadings (users often pose questions in SE)
• Hierarchy of content and information architecture; Flat sites do better as spiders view low level pages as less important
• Social sharing can aid in improving search results
• Multiple formats can aid in improving search results (e.g. videos, articles, tools)
• Format considerations (images need ALT; video needs transcripts)
• Content behind a form may not be indexed, therefore a summary of what is in it, using keywords, is important