Search Engines Optimization treatises take up a lot of space on the internet. You may not need to know and understand the nine items listed here, but you should make sure that whoever is handling your SEO knows something about them.
1. 301 redirect
First let’s talk redirecting in general. Redirection happens when you visit one specific page and immediately after that you’re being automatically redirected to a different page (with a different URL).
Essentially, there are two types of redirection: temporary and permanent. From a user’s perspective there’s no difference between them, but there is one from a search engine’s perspective. 301 redirect is a permanent redirection. It informs search engines that the page they’re trying to access has changed its address permanently. This means that whatever rankings the page already has should be transferred to the new address (this doesn’t happen with a temporary redirection).
First let’s talk redirecting in general. Redirection happens when you visit one specific page and immediately after that you’re being automatically redirected to a different page (with a different URL).
Essentially, there are two types of redirection: temporary and permanent. From a user’s perspective there’s no difference between them, but there is one from a search engine’s perspective. 301 redirect is a permanent redirection. It informs search engines that the page they’re trying to access has changed its address permanently. This means that whatever rankings the page already has should be transferred to the new address (this doesn’t happen with a temporary redirection).
2. Alt Tags. Your best friend won't tell you, but we will. It is a good idea to add invisible words to your images so the search engines can crawl those images. How you add these depends on the website building platform you use.
3. Anchor text. Any words on your website that can be clicked on and reroute the visitor to somewhere else on the website constitutes anchor text.
4. Backlinks. A backlink is a link from someone else's website to yours. Google values backlinks, so long as they are not frivolous. Ideally, you have thousands of backlinks from high traffic, trustworthy websites.
5. Duplicate content on the same website, or even between websites, will work against you.
6. Keywords are one or more words taken together that a reasonable person might key into the search engine query field to come upon your website. These words can be amplified internally and usually should.
7. Meta descriptions are tags that tell Google what your post or page is about. Google will often condense this information into a reasonable description for its users.
8. Title tags. Every page needs a title. Make sure each one has it.
9. Sitemap. This is a file that gives Google a map of all the different URLs in your website. This makes the data on your website easier to crawl and hence to be discovered by your visitor.