Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is essential for improving the visibility and discoverability of a website on search engine results page (SERP). When a website is optimized for search engines, it ranks higher in the search results, making it more likely to be seen by potential visitors. This increased visibility can drive more organic traffic to the site, which is often more valuable than traffic from paid advertisements.

At interon design, search engine optimization (SEO) falls into two categories:

Initial
Ongoing

I consider initial SEO as the standards compliant structure of the site and the inclusion of initial values for structural page elements such as:

Clean, standards-compliant website design
Clear, concise, keyword-rich content written for human visitors
Descriptive and unique page titles
Descriptive page file names
Include description meta tags
Image alt tags
Link titles
Include a Robots.txt file
Include a sitemap.html page
Include a sitemap.xml file

Website standards compliance also contributes to better search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines favor well-structured, standards-compliant websites because they are easier to crawl and index. Clean code and proper use of HTML tags enhance the visibility of a website's content to search engines, improving its ranking in search results. Additionally, websites that follow standards tend to load faster and perform better, which are crucial factors in SEO. Therefore, compliance with web standards can significantly boost a site's search engine performance, driving more organic traffic.

HTML5 has a number of tags to give structure to a page and therefore clues to the search engines. In a simplified description, the structure of the site means the <header> tag is at the top, the <main> is in the middle, and the <footer> is at the bottom of the page.

            
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title>The Title appears in the browser tab</title>
    <meta name="description" content="a description of the web page content">
  </head>
  <body>
    <header>
      <h1>The primary heading should be similar to the title tag above</h1>
    </header>
    <main>
      <p>
      This is a paragraph of text on a web page.
      </p>
      <a href="#">
      This is a link
      </a>
    </main>
    <footer>
      <p>
      a good spot for © copyright information.
      </p>
    </footer>
    </body>
</html>

In another example, let's look at images. Search engines don't see images. Instead, where a human visitor sees this:

Search engines see this:

<img src="img/CSS3-Logo.gif" alt="This site contains CSS3, for greater functionality" width="50" height="68">

Without that alt description, there is no information scent the search engine can pick up on to index that image.

As you might expect from the simplified examples above, much of the initial SEO is in the details. Making sure all images have an alt tag, all pages have a meta description, an <h1> tag, and so on.

There is no point in pursuing SEO any further if your site does not meet the basics. And believe me, there are many sites out there that do not.

Initial Search Engine Optimization

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