But it’s also surprisingly satisfying to spend a few hours optimizing a small site for a new client, and then to see, almost immediately, improvements in that site’s performance in the search engines.

I recently spent less than a half day working a small site (about 5 pages) for a client. I didn’t build the site; it already existed when the client came to me, looking for help to get better search engine placement.

I did minor, basic, SEO 101 type things: I wrote custom title tags and description meta tags for each page. I added appropriate alt text to all the images. I cleaned up the html a little, to use proper h1 and h2 headings. None of this was rocket science, nor even high-level SEO.

Almost right away, the site started performing better in the search engines. From last September through March 10, the site had been found for a grand total of 7 different search phrases, most of which were some variation of the company’s name. I worked my “SEO magic” on March. 10. From March 11 to today, March 28, the site has been found for 46 different search phrases, many of which are excellent keyphrases for this company, and traffic has increased tenfold.

This site has only 6 pages, virtually no backlinks, and no marketing or advertising budget to speak of. The company’s service is a very small, narrow, geographically limited niche which will never draw hundreds or thousands of visitors per month. But within days of the small changes I made to the site, the site was drawing targeted organic search traffic at levels previously undreamed of.

Web sites need to contain good content. It doesn’t matter how many people “ooh” and “aah” over how pretty your site is. If visitors don’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll go elsewhere.

Web sites need to be functional and usable. If your site contains exactly what your visitors are looking for, but they can’t find it because of a random, incomplete, or incoherent navigational structure, they’ll go elsewhere. If visitors find what they’re looking for, but when they fill out your contact form and hit “submit” they get an incomprehensible error message, they’ll go elsewhere.

Web sites need to be spiderable by search engine spiders, so that they can be found. If your site is extremely functional and usable, and contains great content, but your potential clients/customers can’t find you when they search for your product or service, they’ll go elsewhere.

Each of these factors can — and do — have entire books written about them. And there’s much more. In this brief post I’ve barely touched on the essential components of an effective web site. The web site owner shouldn’t need to become an expert in all of these things. But the web site developer should absolutely have more than a passing familiarity with all of the aspects of effective web site development, or should work with people who do.

Every day I see web sites developed by so-called “professionals,” for paying clients, that don’t even come close. I see sites in which every single page is a giant sliced-up graphic exported in toto out of Photoshop. I see sites that use Flash for all internal site navigation. I see sites that use frames and iframes for all or most of the site’s primary content. I see sites that have the same title and description for every single page. I see sites that return a “200 OK” header instead of a “404 Not Found” for non-existent pages. I see sites with plenty of pretty pages but virtually no content. Sometimes I see all of these things in a single site!

Attention, web site owners, and those in need of web sites: Tropical Web Works is not the only web site development firm that can develop an effective, functional site for your business. But please bear these points in mind and ensure that whoever you do hire understands these basic concepts.

The bonus? Most of these recommendations also help your site comply with W3C HTML/XHTML standards, as well as improve accessibility for the disabled.

Title tag: Yes, this one’s a biggie. All indications are that the title of the page matters a lot to Google and the other SEs. Every page on a web site should have well-written title that accurately summarizes the page’s main focus.

Description meta tag: Yes, it matters, in a sense. See here.

Keywords meta tag: No. Google ignores it. I’ve seen evidence that Yahoo finds misspelled words in there, but that’s about it. I use it, because it can be useful during development to help me focus on the keywords that should be on that page. Plus if it ever does become useful, all the sites I’ve developed will already have it. It doesn’t hurt, unless you use it for keyword stuffing.

Headlines and subheads: Yes. There’s evidence that headings and subheads are given more weight by the search engines when they’re enclosed in appropriate heading tags (i.e., h1, h2, etc.). Using a page’s primary keywords in well-written headings and subheadings semantically correct header tags also has the advantage that visitors frequently scan a page, and they’ll see your most important keywords in the headings. And the headings don’t have to be big and ugly: there’s no SE penalty for using CSS to style the headings so that they complement the design of the site.

Image alt text: I don’t believe that alt text in any old image makes much, if any, difference to the search engines. But it’s likely that appropriate alt text in images that are used as links are seen by the SEs as the anchor text for those links. The alt text likely doesn’t carry as much weight in SE rankings as real text links, though; it’s too easy to abuse. It’s a good to include alt text anyway, to help ensure the site is accessible.

Valid code: Not important per se to the search engines, but important for other reasons. Invalid code could interfere with search engine indexing if it’s so badly malformed that the search engine bots simply can’t parse the page.

Bold/strong: In two of his videos, Matt Cutts specifically mentioned the bold and strong tags. The exact wording of his statements suggests that text enclosed in bold and strong tags are likely to carry more weight for ranking purposes.

Internal linking and navigation: A hearty yes. Plain vanilla href links, with appropriate anchor text, give weight both to the page with the link and the page being linked to. Javascript links, Flash links, and (egads!) Java links are of no value. Links within a site distribute PageRank within the site, so the navigation structure and other within-site linking plays a big role.

External links (links to other sites): I dunno. I’ve seen plausible arguments on both sides. If external links help, they probably don’t help much, because anyone can plaster their scraper site/MFA site with links to authority sites. My own opinion? I think that if the sites being linked to are quality sites, and if other signals of quality are present, that external links can help. We know that external links to “bad neighborhoods” can hurt, Matt Cutts has told us that in so many words. My recommendation: If the external link is good for your visitors, go ahead and include it.

Keyword density: No. Well, sort of. There’s no definitive percentage of keyword density, no magic bullet. But logic tells us that overdoing it will end up making a page feel spammy. And unless you’re Adobe or George Bush, it’s probably impossible for a page on your site to rank well for a keyword or phrase unless that keyword or phrase appears somewhere on the page. My advice: Do the keyword research, then write for your users. If your writing is on topic, the keywords will put themselves where they belong, for the most part.

Good content: Yes, yes, and yes again. Valuable, well-written text that gives your users what they’re looking for, whether it’s a specific product and product specifications, or the history of the blue widget. In the long haul, there’s no substitute.

Not for search engine optimization in the sense of helping a page appear higher in the search results.

No, the description meta tag is more a search engine marketing tag, and it should be written strictly for humans, not for search engine robots. If your page has a good relevant description meta tag, and if the keywords in the description meta tag are a good match for the keywords in the search, there is a high likelihood that your description is what will appear as the description, or snippet, underneath the page title on the search engine results page (SERP).

If that description is well-written (from a marketing perspective) it may well be what convinces the user to click through to that page, rather than to one of the other pages appearing on that SERP.

I see WAAAAAY too many websites that have no description tag, or that use the same description on every page. Every page on a site should include a custom, unique description of that specific page.