SEO is really important for small and big companies these days. If your site does not follow the pattern of good SEO your site might not get noticed as much as it should be.
Let us say you got a great product you want to sell to customers internationally around the globe. You might think that your product is so good that you don't need any SEO, but this is incorrect. To get noticed in search engines you must always think of SEO when creating your website.
There isn't to much of a work to get great SEO on your site, and to get noticed by big search engines like Google, i have created a list of the most important SEO tips for your website to get noticed.
What is the goal of your website? Use common practice to inform your customers and search engines of what your websites purpose. If you sell a product named "Fantastic product" you should find out what category the product is in, and find the abstract term for the product. Remember that people don't search for "Fantastic product" but the abstract term or the category.
When it comes to search engines they have to parse the HTML. If the code is unparsable or not valid, some search engines might evaluate the site as bad quality and your content will not get seen by the search engines as it should be seen.
Remember that search engines can not read the flash objects content. Try to avoid flash as much as you can, flash is starting to get outdated anyway - we now got the replacement for this: HTML5.
There are plenty of sitemap libraries for php, create a dynamic sitemap that you register on your google account so google know exactly what to look for. Create a map that contains the most important links on your webpage.
Also you should have dynamic rss feeds that gets parsed from the database, google can read these feeds very efficiently.
If your website contains many 404 links that links to nothing, you should really remove these links or update them to link correctly.
Use url friendly links and not too long links.
A good link is: http://example.com/press
A bad link is: http://example.com/index.php?c=5&site=press&list=all&content=html
A good practice to make this happen with PHP is to use a framework or a cms that has features of creating url friendly links. Use a framework that is using the MVC pattern. A front-controller/router in conjunction with a .htaccess file is the way to go. You might want to take a look at CodeIgniter or our own framework GnomePHP for PHP frameworks.
If many people link to your website in articles on their website you will rank higher on search engines. If your service/product is good this should not be too hard. Tip: if a domain with .gov extension links to your site you will rank even higher. The higher the site that is linking to your site, the higher your site will get ranked.
Say that a user goes to http://example.com/thislinkdoesnotexist, is it really good to get the standard 404 apache message, no. Create a customer 404 handler.
This is easily done with apache, you can also create 404 pages with php itself. Create a good and informing page that the link did not exist -but you can have the opportunity to find something similar.
The title tag should be unique whenever the link in the url changes. If the title is the same on all pages you will rank lower on search engines.
Dont use too long titles, create a nice title for the specific page. The title tag should be consistant and clear.
A good title might be: Mysite.com - PHP basics
A bad title might be: Mysite.com - here is a good tutorial for the php basics and how to learn php
Your website need unique content - not only a unique product/service. With unique content search engines can index your content as more important. If you copy content from other sites (wich should never be done anyway) your site will get down ranked badly. If your content is unique, your users will also benefit from this and users will visit your site more often. Never copy content, but you can learn from other articles and create a better article with your own words. This is what you learn at school to, "write the résumé with your own words". When writing the specific content, be sure to include abstract terms and specific terms.
A good sentence: I had great success writing code in the programming language - PHP.
A bad sentence: I had great success doing php.
There are search engines that are still using metadata tags to index your sites content. Metadata with the keywords attribute should contain keywords for the specific document you are on - not the site goal.
A good metadata keywords element for this page can be:
<meta name="keywords" content="SEO, top 10, tips, tricks"/>
A bad metadata keywords element:
<meta name="keywords" content="PKJ.NO, Best, top, consulting, html, css, php, java, jquery, javascript"/>