Here are some of the SEO considerations that I make when building a website. Let fellow readers know what you think I may have missed and what your thoughts are in the comments.

Domain Name

The first consideration is the Domain Name. I normally aim to get a dot com but failing that, a dot net is probably the next best option.

In the domain name, aim for about 2 keywords and avoid dashes and numbers. Also, try and come up with a domain name that can be verbally told to somebody without confusion as to how to type it into a keyboard e.g. crazyfrog.net rather than 2leap-4joy.com as an extreme example.

Registering a dot com helps people to key in the correct domain name for your site since they are likely to assume that it is a dot com unless it’s regionally specific such as .au or .co.uk for example.

URL Format

Here I tend to go for a URL stub that is formed from my post title (post/my-keywords/). I avoid the query string format (post?id=44)

In WordPress, you enter /%postname% in the admin area under Settings->Permalinks->Custom Structure Then, your post name (post title text) will be used to form this link. You just have to be careful not to use the same post title again.

Page Title

This is the most important thing to get right for on-page SEO. Check out search engine results and see how they highlight the keywords in the page titles. So if your web page is about SEO Considerations, only have these words in the Title tag of the page.

Description

This is a meta-tag which means it slots into the header part of your page, I tend to avoid using this and prefer to let the search engine grab my first paragraph of my post. So we need to remember this when writing our post, that the first paragraph is important for SEO and should strongly relate to the keywords in our title tag and the URL.

Keywords Meta Tag

I try to avoid using this since it is old-in-the-tooth and has a history of keyword manipulation. One reason that I avoid the Description meta tag too. These can be a signal to a search engine that you are trying too hard to optimize your site for SEO and not naturally posting content.

On a side-note, the popular plugin “All in one SEO pack” does make heavy use of these tags, and it comments on every page of your site in hidden text as to what changes it made to your pages.

Duplicate Content

Avoid replication of large amounts of content on your website. This is recommended by Google in their webmaster guidelines.

Unfortunately, WordPress out-of-the-box does this in the archives and on the home page. So they introduced a band-aid solution in the form of the canonical meta tag that is designed to indicate which page is to be recognized as the main one. And All-in-one SEO pack makes use of this coupled with search engine robot meta tags to no-index pages.

But I would rather not use these work-arounds.

What I did was to set up my blog to only display 1 post on the home page, and excerpts in feeds and archive pages. So I now have substantially different pages on virtually every area of my blog (latest post excepted). Or at least, once I post more content.

Providing only excerpts as part of feeds is a good way to avoid having your entire blog posts republished all over the web (since syndication means you want what you syndicate in feeds to be republished according to any license agreement that you may attach to the feed). Check out the creative Commons license if you would like to insist on attribution links back to your site.

OK, that is me done for now on on-page SEO, I have more to add on this later. But I welcome your comments and questions …