David Fiske Affiliate marketing & web development musings from Fiske Towers

I have reached the chapters in the Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day book where I can start implementing some SEO tactics.

I will try to divulge as much as possible but when it comes to keyword selection and optimisation, I will not be able to publish this information here. The reason is that it will then pit www.davidfiske.com against www.comparesatnav.co.uk which is not in my best interests.

It is for that reason I advise you invest in a copy of Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day. It starts off slow but it is packed full of useful information in sections 2 and 3.

Anyway, here is what I have done so far.
 
For me, I would rather get my site looking as best I can possibly get it before I start promoting it. After all, if I promoted my site before I tweaked it, I could end up discouraging people from revisiting the site.

So today I have implemented search engine friendly URLs. In English, I have added a file to my webserver (called a .htaccess file) that alters the way visitors can load a page.

Examples are always best! Let's take the TomTom Go 910. In the 'olden' days, people would have visited http://www.dbfcs.co.uk/shop/sat_nav/products.php?q=TOMTOM+GO+910. Click on it now and it still goes to the correct landing page. The .htaccess file convets the ?q=... section into a logical path and so the new search engine friendly URL is http://www.dbfcs.co.uk/shop/sat_nav/product/TOMTOM-GO-910.html. So what the search engine sees is a static html page (optimised with the product name as the page title) as opposed to a series of operators (q=...). Search engines prefer the static links as opposed to the dynamic URLs.

The benefit of changing the URLs over is that the search engines should be happier with the new format. It may not improve ranks or it may. What matters is that this first step is one that works with the engines and not against it. Remember, search engines are your best friends so don't do anything to offend them!

You may have picked up on what I said about the page titles. If you create a page about credit cards and save it as cc1.htm, when the search engine looks at your site, it cannot be sure what your content is based on your page name. Rename that page to cheap_credit_card_deals.htm and suddenly it is obvious what the page is about.

If you are looking for a good content management system that does this with the URLs, use Website Baker. Once you have set it up, each page becomes a virtual directory. So, for example, take a page on Driver Shortage - http://drivershortage.co.uk/hgv_lgv/pages/hgv-driver-resources/recommended-reading.php.

The site is held in the hgv_lgv directory which is a real directory. The Website Baker software automatically creates directories and files in a logical order. So to get the result above, you will have to drill down from the home page, to the HGV Driver Resources section, to the Recommended Reading section. Website Baker takes care of the coding and relative hyperlinking to ensure that it is all viewed correctly. All you need is select one template package and it does the rest.

Anyway, back to Compare Sat Nav.

I have also played around with the keywords and description meta tags. After reading the book, I have tweaked them slightly to read more as an explanation of the page content as opposed to a brief line of text.

In a non-SEO related activity, I have changed the navigation tab title to menu to avoid confusion as people may confuse this for a satellite navigation link as opposed to a website navigation link.