SEO Guidelines

Here’s a general, beginner-oriented mostly, common sense rules for SEO. It’s the first steps before and after purchasing a domain:

URLs

• URLs should be keyword optimised and user friendly (avoid *+%! characters).
• Use hyphens instead of underscores to separate words within the URL.
• URL length should be under 100 characters.
• Keep URLs lowercase.
• Non-www versions of URLs should redirect to the www version (e.g. example.com should 301 to www.example.com).
• Non-secure http versions of URLs should redirect to the secure https version (e.g. http://www.example.com should 301 to https://www.example.com).
• /index.php or /index.html style URLs should rewrite to www.example.com.

Website crawlers & bots

• Include both HTML and XML sitemaps to help users and crawlers discover your site’s structure and content (sitemaps should automatically update with the addition/removal/editing of pages).
• robots.txt or meta robots tags should only block select directories/pages as required.
• Content should load within HTML (crawlers can have trouble with JavaScript etc.).
• An editable rel="canonical" tag should be implemented on every page.
• Content should still be visible with JavaScript and CSS styles turned off in browser.

Semantic Web, Schema and Rich Snippets

• Implement any structured data (Schema) elements relevant to your website including breadcrumbs, event, organization, local business, ratings/reviews, price, product, images for eCommerce etc.

Multi-platform & Multi-device

• Cater for multiple devices including desktop, mobile and tablet.
• Site should work across all browsers and major operating systems.
• Ensure site conforms to Google’s Mobile SEO Best Practices.

User Tracking/Conversion

• Implement Google Tag Manager across all pages incorporating Google Analytics and, optionally, Google Ads Remarketing codes as applicable.
• Implement Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Redirect users to a “thank you” page after any form submission.

Note that, in 2021, web standards count more than ever. A well-formed web document will help your site rank better.

👋 Added by Ciprian on Saturday, October 12, 2019 in Blog, Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation. Last modified on Friday, December 11, 2020.