Structural SEO
SEO, SEO, it's all so 2005... but yet, if you check the average website, the SEO concerns lack on the implementation side.
Everyone in the Marketing department is concerned about metadata, keyword density, and all the other recommended metrics to quantify you content SEO, but, for the most part, their website implementation lacks at least one part of something that I call Structural SEO.
What is structural SEO?
Structural SEO is the SEO that one can provide on the software side. It sets the base for the content writer, maximizing search engine indexability.
Minimal key features of structural SEO are:
Page titles
Page titles should vary according to content since it is a very good place to have important keywords.
In my opinion, they should also include the website name and navigation context, but not too much of it, and the content title should always come in first.
Example of a title:
Structural SEO < SEO < metaduck
Headings and styling
Content should be organized in headings. For that, content management people should have CSS stylesheets in place so that no additional formatting is required when entering content. Too much formatting using markup hurts SEO. Content should be only content.
As an example, when producing content templates or layouts, I always put the website title inside a <h1> tag.
Content title is next, which shold have it's own h2 title, and content subtitles should be inside h3, etc.
Accessibility on navigation
Navigation menus should not be javascript or flash dependent. This sounds simple, but there are still a lot of old and new websites out there implementing dynamic menus that are unreadable by the search engines.
Javascript is ok, but you should have the browser fallback on plain HTML. Your menu should work when the browser has javascript disabled.
Proeminence on navigation
Important navigation links should be placed as early as possible on content so that they are more relevant to the search engines.
Image titles and alts
All static images should have relevant alt and title attributes, and the content management tools should facilitate (and impose) filling these in.
Search-engine-friendly URLs
URLs should be minimal, but provide enough information on the content. For me, wordpress-style URLs are the way to go.
Example for the URL of a page with the title "Structural SEO":
http://mydomain.com/structural-seo
That's it. No file extensions, no unnecessary arguments, no query string. Words are well separated.
Several products / frameworks allow this, and several make it very hard to implement, specially when using Microsoft ones.
My choice ones are Wordpress (for small websites) and Ruby on Rails routing configuration (for larger websites and applications).
Conclusion
If you are running a website development project, please have these considerations in mind before the building phase starts.
If possible, before contracting anyone for building a website, ask what he can do technically to maximize SEO. These should be their minimal concerns.
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