Quick search engine optimization for webdesigners
Posted by iliuta in Web Design Mar 4th, 2010 | 28 responsesNowadays, if you do Web design, you are also required to make some decent SEO optimizations before delivering the site to the customer. Or at least that’s what we found out from our users and it sounds plausible. Problem is that learning SEO, finding the right tools takes time and might not be your favorite pastime. So what if you could check and get straightforward optimization tips for the most important parameters directly in Firefox?
SenSEO https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9403 does just that.
SenSEO it`s a Firefox Plugin and it has been integrated with Firebug. SenSEO gives you quick previews on important SEO components from your webpage and optimization tips based on the results.
Installing SenSeo
Installation is quite easy – first install Firebug Firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843 addon then SenSeo https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9403.Restart Firefox. All set.
How does it work?
Lets take as example our Creative DW menu pack page http://www.extendstudio.com/product/creative-dw-menus-pack.html and test it for the following
keyword: “dreamweaver menu”. SensSEO appears on the Firefox bottom bar.
1.Your title tag
The first thing that SenSEO checks is your title tag that refers to your webpage title and how well the name is related to your specified keywords. For example, our Creative DW menu pack webpage title is: “Dreamweaver Menu extension: Creative DW Menus “and the keywords for our test were “dreamweaver menu”. See the picture below.
The SenSEO Grade for how well the “dreamweaver menu” keywords were integrated in the creative dreamweaver menu pack webpage is B and we got 81 points from 100.
2. Meta-description
The second component that SenSEO is looking for is how well you use the webpage meta-description related to your selected keywords, in our case “dreamweaver menu”. The meta-description on our page <meta name=”description” content=”Creative DW Menu Pack is a suite of Dreamweaver extensions that seamlessly blends the flexibility of DHTML and the Flash look and feel to create beautifully web site menus. “/> has more than 150 characters. And also you should start your meta-description with your keywords. See the picture below.
3. The use of your meta-keywords
You should use a meta-keyword tag just once, or else you could be penalized by a search engine for spamming and your website would not be indexed. You should include less than 10 keywords in the meta-keywords tag, and they should be relevant and also appear in the content of your webpage. See the picture below.
4. The use of the robots.txt
This text file tells a search engine robot how it should access the content of your website. Usually the default mode is set to allow (read all pages), but you can also set to disallow some folders (for example admin) or even stop some search engines from indexing your site (usually good to have in production). Stop Googlebot example:
# Google
User-agent: googlebot
Allow: /
5. The use of your headline tags
You should include your keywords in the <h1> tag and you should place this <h1> tag before the <h2> and <h3> tag. See the picture below.
6. Your page content
The images should have alternative text that is relevant to your content. Keyword density should be between 5% and 7%. The keyword density refers to the frequency with which a given keyword or phrase appears within the content of your page. If there are 100 words on your page, and the word ‘extension’ appears once, then the keyword density of your page with regards the word extension is 1%. You should offer unique content on your page if you want higher ranking on search engines, make sure that the webpage code, whatever it is (html, css, php, javascript) is valid and you should optimize the load time of the webpage, by compressing images, external css styles and javascripts files. See the picture below.
7. The name of your domain
SenSEO checks how relevant is your domain name to your selected keywords, in our example it checks www.extendstudio.com for relevant use with the “dreamweaver menu” keywords. That’s why is important to name the files with relevant keywords (example “dreamweaver-menu.html”) and folders as well. Do not use special characters in your domain name, and do not use underscore to separate words. See the picture below.
8. The path to your webpage
You should keep the path to your webpage short, and do not use dynamic parameters to the path of your webpage, and always use lowercase words in the path. See the picture below.
I especially enjoyed using this plugin for Firefox because you don’t really need to go out and learn SEO – it’s all there: you can check directly inside Firefox the optimization status and it gives you points for each completed step. You can see the complete list of your components and the optimization for the components by pressing the button “Show components”.
What do you think?
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28 Responses to “Quick search engine optimization for webdesigners”
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Extend feedAbout Us
I am using Flexi Panels and I have Macromedia Dreamweaver 8. It won’t install, it is now asking me for Dreamweaver 9. I am also using CS4 Extention Manager
Help!
Hi Deb,
For FlexiPanels you need to have Dreamweaver CS3 or Dreamweaver CS4. Having only the extension manager won’t help. Please contact us on support@extendstudio.com if you need more details.
Thanks,
Cristian Dorobantescu
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i am a newbie in Search Engine Optimization but i think that the submission of articles in article directories is one of the best ways to gain backlinks. |
SomeThat’s helpful information thanks. Anyone know about a affordable SEM company who won’t do a sub-standard job?? I’ve got soo much search engine marketing to be done and not enough time. Need to pay someone to help.
IPs matter. Having different Class-C’s is what you’re looking for. Idealy you should even have those different accounts on different servers rather than just having different Class-C’s coming from a single MAC address on a server. There are a number of hosts that do it, but what kind of budget are you looking at? How many sites, IPs etc?
Great post thx a lot !
I appreciate your article, do a good job, continue to workhard.
SEM is actually pretty easy and your points will surely help any SEO. Definitely bookmarked!
great post my friend, very nice. congrats!
Simple problems need fixing, and that’s what you’ve done. All my problems are now solved!
thanks !! very helpful post!
thanks !! very helpful post!
This is impressive, I’m gonna put this in the bookmarks before I misplace the link I don’t believe I’ll ever make it back here otherwise
Wow! Thank you! I always wanted to write in my site something like that. Can I take part of your post to my blog?
It has been a pleasure for me to read this post. Good Stuff!
yes you can, and it would be nice to place a link back from our post.
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Once you discover the long tail keywords you want to target, you then need to understand who your competition is for that keyword phrase. Market Samurai provides a module called SEO competition that allows you to explore each one of the top ranked, page one listings to see why they have secured the top position, and helps you identify what you can do to maybe secure a page one listing. You can check out why it is the top of Search Engine Marketing tools and also it’s my favorite
@Sam I know what your mean. In the current economy its hard to find a job that pays good enough to live on and is consistent. I have found that if you just work hard and are consistent you can succeed. Look at the writer of this article, they are clearly hard working and have just been consistent over time and are now enjoying at least what would appear as somewhat of a success. I would encourage everyone to just keep hustling and moving forward.
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What must I do to obtain my web site for the top of google do I have to have to hire an seo firm or can I do it myself thanks for the help
Thank you for the advice. I found your 1st point to be most interesting .
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Thank you! I really think that a couple of my friends will appreciate this article.. now where is that e-mail to your buddies button again?
Great article! We always tell our customers to make sure any SEO service they use provide some sort of guarantee.
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