SEO | Best Practices Series | #1 – Your Site

This article will guide you through the important steps on how to create and maintain sites in Google. If you have an existing site, use this as a reference to ensure that you are doing everything right. I am going to review 4 areas at a time:

First things first, the domain name dilemma.

Your domain name should be brand-able. Keyword rich with hyphens type of domains are not longer relevant. Focus on a .com since it is the one searchers will enter when not sure about extensions, and is the easiest to brand. As far as registering it, do it for more than one year since this helps with the trustbox in Google. If you have many related domain names for the same content it is always good to only take one as the main domain and to redirect (301) any others to it. This way, you can make sure not to have duplicate content issues.

Less is more, when it comes to web design, CONTENT is king.

When writing for your site, you will want to incorporate the keywords you’re thinking to use for your SEO. Your text content should reflect some of the keywords you may be thinking of Make sure your code is search engine friendly.

Javascript and CSS, in code or out?

Good question. JavaScript and CSS should be in external files. They will increase page size otherwise. Specially when having the same code for menus or styles on multiple pages, when this can be easily fixed by doing it externally.

Demystifying the page size limit.

There is NOT page size limitation here. There you have it. The 101kb limit thing is absolutely incorrect. But do not take this the wrong way. You need to make sure the size of your page is about 40K on average. Up to 50K is OK. Consider loading time as a factor, and the text/graphics ratio is very important.

Summary:
This article will guide you through the important steps on how to create and maintain sites in Google. If you have an existing site, use this as a reference to ensure that you are doing everything right.