5 SEO Tips for a Small Company (Part 2)

If I am a small company asking a web designer to set up a site for me, what are the key questions I should ask him/her about SEO?

1. It is a dynamic or static site?
“Dynamic” means having a “?” in the page’s URL in the address bar on top.

What do our friends at Google advise?
“If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few”

This is a dynamic URL example:
http://www.domain.com/?catalogid=123&colourid=red&product=shoes

This is a static URL example:
http://www.domain.com/red-shoes.html

Always ensure your developer uses static URLs.

2. If using a CMS, will the site map be automatically updated when I add a new page?
Lots of developers / designers sell content management systems (CMS)
If you add a new page, it’s important that your sitemap be automatically updated with it.

A good free SEO-friendly ecommerce system is OSCommerce.

3. Will you use the same Titles & Meta Descriptions on all pages?
Most designers do because it’s a short-cut and clients rarely notice.
Ensure these are different on every page.

Note that “Meta Descriptions” are useless for getting high rankings but once achieved, they’re the snippet of text that appears in the Google results so write them to attract clicks.
(Meta keywords are just a waste of space)

4. Which keywords are you going to use for these?
Use tools like Google’s Keyword Tool to determine what people are searching for relating to what you sell.

Play with the drop-down tool here. You may find it interesting!

5. Any Flash or Splash Pages?
Don’t use Flash sites unless there’s a text version also.
Flash sites are virtually invisible to Google & co.

A splash page is typically a nice picture you need to click on to enter a site.
Just like you, everyone else is busy. Don’t waste their time.
Get them reading your excellent quality content fast.

6. Will page headings be pictures or text?
All page headings should be text inside <H1> tags as mentioned above.

Yes, this reduces the attractiveness of the pages but ultimately Internet Marketing is a trade-off between getting people to your site & getting them to pick up the phone to you / buy online.

Part 1: 5 SEO Tips for a Small Company (Part 1)

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John Ring is Technical Director at RingJohn Ltd
RingJohn.com was Ireland’s 1st Google-AdWords Qualified company.
We specialise in all aspects of Website Marketing, Advertising and Conversion Improvement
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