Start Your Search Engines: Mad Hatter Tech Goes Under the SEO Hood

The job of a search engine is to connect people with the things they are looking for online. A great business knows that an effective online presence starts by providing people with the information they need about its products and/or services across all of its digital real estate.

The process is a little more complex than providing great content. To achieve a great ranking for our clients, Mad Hatter Tech created Start Your Engines, a Top 12 SEO Checklist.  Treat the search engines and your customers like a guest arriving at an airport.   You and your site (car) are there to make sure your customers arrive in style to their destination and its your job to get them where they are going as comfortably and as quickly as possible. 

Wave A Sign To Greet Your Guest: As one often sees in the airport, those greeting guests they have never met hang out a sign to make sure they connect with the right person.  

Meta Descriptions and Titles are simple signs you can hang on each page of your site.  Make sure you put some deliberate thought and strategy into how you title and describe pages.  These mini-introductions are often the only pieces of information a user will look at to determine if your site is the one for which they are searching. 
 

1. Choose Your Destination Wisely: Once you arrive at the airport, you always want to make sure you are driving to the right destination.  To www or not to www - that is the question. Using both, you risk ‘watering down’ your search-ability as instead of one destination there are two - slows all the weary travellers down as they try to decide between the two destinations.  Best practices and research suggests you use www.  However, if this is not your preferred URL, you need not worry - as long as you are consistent in your use, your search results will prosper.  
    
2. And Take the Fastest Route: Make it easy for the search engines to index only what they need and want with the Robots.txt file.  Not every page needs to be scanned by search engines (i.e. ads) and you can use this file to keep specific pages from being crawled and keep it clean.
    
3. Drive A Fast Site...: With today's demanding consumers, site speed is increasingly important.  We are monstrous consumers of content. Most of us want things yesterday, especially when it comes to finding information online. With the average page load taking 1.5 seconds, it’s important to check how well your website’s performing.
    
4. ...With Lots of Options: Nicer cars usually have luxurious options and let's be honest - it makes for a nicer drive.  Make your search results are luxurious with some rich snippets.  Rich snippets are pieces of data used to show a more robust listing in a Google search. For example, you can use a rich snippet to display reviews, music samples, or upcoming events.
    
5. Avoid Driver Distractions: Mistakes in the way of code errors are costly for your customers and your rankings. It can affect rankings, and most importantly, user behaviour. Great SEO starts with how the website is built and architected.  When developers cut corners and are not meticulous with how your site is coded, you pay a steep long term price for a discount deal.  Sites also need to be rigorously tested across multiple browser platforms to make sure every webpage looks and loads the way we intend it to and all pages can be found.
    
6. Stay Away From Dead Ends: Crawl errors can be avoided by regular maintenance. For example, if you update a page with a new URL, create a redirect from the old URL to the new one so users who bookmarked the old still get to the requested content.
    
7. Map It Out using GPS: Sitemaps and indexing are just as important as your GPS on a long trip and the benefits are two-fold.  You can make sure BOTH your users and the search engines get to their destination quickly and painlessly.   There are two kinds of sitemaps, HTML and XML. An HTML sitemap is the ‘master lists’ you’ll often find in the footer of a website, to display a list of every page within the website. An XML sitemap should be submitted to search engines like Google, because it indicates what pages, and how often you want those pages scanned for indexing.
    
8. Prime Your Engine:  Keeping your engine primed for performance is similar to keeping your H1 and H2 headings primed with the right information.  These headings on your website are the ‘behind the scenes’ stars.  Search engine crawlers ‘read’ the information in H1 and H2 headings to help determine what’s important on the page and also compare these headings with the content found within the page for consistency. Make sure there’s only ONE H1 per page and since H2 headings are sub headings, you can have multiple H2 heading within a page.  
    
9. Maintain Your Vehicle:  Your naming conventions for URLs are important and you need to maintain the URLs of your website and keep them in good form. A good URL is simple, descriptive, easily shareable, and uses dashes to separate words. Make sure you customize your URLs at every opportunity, including your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and Pinterest accounts.
    
10. Customize Your License Plate: A custom 404 page is very much like a custom license plate.  It tells people a little bit about you and every touch point of your online brand should be user-friendly. A little humour and creativity coupled with great options on how to navigate to another page is the best way to keep a user on your website and make your traffic 'land' on a page, which is important in your overall rankings and search engine results pages (SERPS). Keep this in mind when designing a proper 404 page.
     
11. Make the Drive Entertaining:  Websites need multimedia such as  images, podcasts and videos to entertain guests.  The proper labeling of all your multimedia helps users find your website. Titles and alt tags allow you to label and name your entertainment choices - these alt tags are read and used by the search engines and also by software helping the visually impaired.

Great SEO takes regular maintenance.  Remember, search engines look to match websites that will best suit the search results. “Stuffing” a page with keywords simply doesn’t work and in fact you will be penalized.  Provide relevant and informative content on a website primed for performance and maintained regularly and you'll get and keep good results. 

If you’re interested in priming your engine and optimizing the digital roadways of your website and would like help, let’s connect!

This video explains how Google's search engine works.