Basic Search Engine Optimisation Tips

[elmerpc]

Thanks for the excellent tips Temi. I think your list is all about on-page optimisation?

[NickE83]

anyone who is serious about being up there in the future should check out SEO 2020 and theme zoom, these guys are SEO scientists.

[johnafrankllin]

I would like to do some corrections

Originally Posted by temi

1. Use Meta tags correctly; here is a basic skeleton of the minimum aspect of meta tags you should complete:
Title:

Title is not a meta tag

5. Try and valid you HTML tags and eliminate any errors

3. The two sites I had a look at today, use image navigation, this is not bad BUT if your navigation is text based, its even better.
If you must use image-based navigation use Alt Attribute rather than alt tag, if you use images then adding the alt attribute is a waste of time (from an SEO point of view but not a usability one), unless the image is a link. If the image is a link then the alt attr text becomes the anchor text. (Thanks to OWG for correcting this).
use alt tags to optimise each navigation item.

How will you validate the HTML according W3 if you are not using Alt.
Also if you just put Alt="" to validate the HTML, I think this is what the waste of time.
Also never forget that the Text in Alt attribute do crawled by search engine spiders. check the cached page's "Cached Text" of any web page. You will find the Text in Alt Tag.
I'll Say that Alt is a Tag
reference: <alt>descriptive text goes here</alt>

[camp185]

Here is a site I like to use to check meta tags. It also has many other great functions.

Meta Tag Analyzer