SEO

Guidelines

Site Architecture

URLs

• URLs should be keyword optimised and user friendly (avoid *+%! characters)
• Use hyphens instead of underscores to separate words within the URL
• URL length should be under 100 characters
• Keep URLs lowercase
• 'Non www' versions of URLs should redirect to the www version e.g. sitename.com should 301 to www.sitename.com
• Non-secure 'http' versions of URLs should redirect to the secure 'https' version e.g. http://www.sitename.com should 301 to https://www.sitename.com
• /default.aspx or /index.html style URLs should rewrite to www.sitename.com

Website crawlers & bots

• Include both HTML and XML sitemaps to help users and crawlers discover your site's structure and content (sitemaps should automatically update with the addition/removal/editing of pages)
• Robots.txt or Meta robots tags should only block select directories/pages as required
• Content should load within HTML (crawlers can have trouble with JavaScript etc.)
• An editable rel="canonical" tag should be implemented on every page
• Content should still be visible with JavaScript and CSS styles turned off in browser

Semantic Web, Schema and Rich Snippets

• Implement any structured data (Schema) elements relevant to your website including breadcrumbs, event, organization, local business, ratings/reviews, price, product, images for eCommerce etc. - here is a great tool for getting started with Schema
• Insert publisher/author Google+ rel="publisher" and rel="author" into markup where applicable

Multi-platform & Multi-device

• Cater for multiple devices including desktop, mobile and tablet
• Site should work across all browsers and major operating systems
• Ensure site conforms to Google's Mobile SEO Best Practices.

User Tracking / Conversion

• Implement Google Tag Manager across all pages incorporating Google Analytics and AdWords codes as applicable
• Implement Google Webmaster Tools
• Redirect users to a 'thank you' page after any form submission