SEO Tips For Beginners Part 1: 4 Tips For Webdesigners

It’s amazing how many websites still have a bad SEO design today, that’s why I’m going to  give some SEO tips. Allthough these SEO tips might seem “basic”, these are actually must-have SEO techniques every web developer should know!

This article is for webdisigners, for people that develop websites or WordPress themes. If you are an editor or an article writer, then take a look at the following article: SEO Tips For Beginners: 7 Tips For Article Writers.

1) Title tag

The “Title” (tag) is one of the most important indicators for Google to know what a page is about. So it’s very important to give a title for each page on a blog or a website. This title should be unique, don’t give every page on your site or blog the same title!

In WordPress, the page title will be the same of the title of a page or an article. When installing the SEO plugin All In One SEO Pack, you have some more control about how your titles will look like.

2) Right use of header tags (H1, H2 & H3)

Header tags (especially H1, H2 and H3) are very important for Google. Still, a lot of web developers don’t use these tags the right way, some even don’t use them at all!

Let me explain common mistakes in this screenshot:

As you see, in this case the H1 tag is used for the blog title, the H2 tag is used for the article title, and the H3 tags are used for the box titles on the left (or right). When Google crawls a page, one of the first things that is looked for, is the H1 tag. So it’s very important that the text between the H1 tags tells something more about the content of the page. It’s also very important that you use the H1 tags just ONCE on a page. So using the H1 tags for your blog title AND your page title is NOT OK.

H2 and H3 tags should be used for subtitles in the article. So don’t use the H3 tag for box titles in the right menu bar, Google won’t understand this.

Like I said, a lot of webdesigners don’t use these header tags the right way. Even bigger companies don’t always use the header tags the right way. For example:

• Artisteer: I sometimes use this template generator to create simple themes. One of the first things I always do after I created a new theme is to change a little bit code to get the headers right.
• WooThemes: for some of my own sites I use WooThemes. I like it a lot because it’s ready to use out of the box and it’s easy to change. But some WooThemes themes also use the header tags the wrong way. This is easy to change with a little bit of coding.

So, let’s take a look at our screenshot with right use of the header tags:

The above screenshot uses the header tags the right way:

• H1 headers for titles
• H2 and H3 headers for subtitles

3) Valid (X)HTML

If you’re a web or theme developer, it’s of great importance that you create your site with valid code (HTML, CSS, …). Websites with valid (X)HTML score much better in Google then websites with a lot of code errors because they are easer for Google to read.

4) Some WordPress specific SEO tips

When installing WordPress, you should install some plugins for better SEO of your site:

• All In One SEO Pack
• Google Analyticator
• XML Sitemaps

For more information about these plugins, please read my following article: My 20+ Favourite WordPress Plugins.

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