My (early) experiences with SEO

I've been doing a lot of SEO work over the past week or two.

My "tl;dr point" will be this: SEO needs to be baked into the website as early as possible, preferably at the design phase.

Now for the "tl" part :)

The two key things, that I've found, with SEO are:

Organisation
Having all images under one folder, and all css files under another folder definitely helps when it comes to tracking down problems and setting up robots.txt files.

Standards
Both traditional web standards, such as using H1's and making sure titles, descriptions and alt tags are set, and "personal" standards, such as only using lowercase links.

When it comes to alt tags there is some arguments about the impact it has on SEO, but I think it's a small thing to get into the habit of doing, and if it helps, great. Anyway, the real reason alt tags are around is to help people who can't see all that well, so I think even for that reason it's a good idea (for non-layout related images.)

The self-discipline with naming formats will be of a massive help to prevent you from creating duplicate (or more) points of access to content. In a crawlers eyes "example.com/Page.aspx" is different to "example.com/page.aspx", and as such can lead to problems with sites getting multiple entries in indexes, where they end up competing with them self.

Also a tip, at the moment (Feb 2011) hyphens are the symbol to use to replace spaces in page names (i.e. www.example.com/this-is-a-page.aspx, instead of www.example.com/thisisapage.aspx).

If you're "attacking" an old site that needs bending with the SEO bar, then the best thing to do is setup 301 redirects from the old links to the new ones. Now this doesn't mean that every example HAS to be taken care of; only the old links that are being replaced should need 301'ing. Afterall, people normally copy and paste links, so if you've not been using "ThIs-Is-A-pAgE.aspx" then there shouldn't be a reason to 301 it. The exception to that is when you KNOW someone has a link to one of your pages and it's outside your self-disciplined regime. You know this because you've setup Google's wonderful webmaster tools, of course!

The other angle of attack on SEO is probably more a marketing / sales one, and that's around getting a community of cross-linkers, and generating fresh, important, content on a regular basis. From a technical point of view, there really is no reason why a website shouldn't be optimised for the search crawlers.

The only pointer I can give on that last bit is to become an "authority" on something that you know a lot about, and are willing to publicly share. Such as providing a pretty web app for people to use to generate international dialing phone numbers (for calling or texting), or a big bunch of recipes that you swear by. (Obviously it helps if this is somewhat related to what you're trying to sell!)

Once you've got that covered you can do the networking and try to get people to cross-link to you as a reference. That should increase your Page Rank, which will help your SEO efforts.