SiteValet

On of our goals at SiteValet is to take care of the technical stuff so you don’t have to worry about it. But you should at least understand why this stuff is important.

Why is this important to me or my visitors?

You need to make sure your site has been properly coded and that it uses certain technical best practices. This is critical for two big reasons:

• It ensures your site displays properly on different devices (think iPhone, iPad, Blackberry) and in different browsers. This is becoming more and more important as more users visit your site from mobile devices. This is especially true as travellers are making last-minute, on-the-road travel planning decisions with their smartphones.
• It’s one of the key steps in optimizing your site for search engines (SEO) like Google.

To put it as plainly as possible: There’s a good chance your website looks weird or doesn’t display at all on smartphones and other devices. And there’s some very low hanging fruit in terms of what you can do to improve your placement in search engine results!

OK. Tell me more.

First, there are a number of coding standards that your site should adhere to. Without getting too technical, here are a few :

• The code of your site should be well structured. By using using various levels of headings, your site can convey the relationships between pieces of content and their relative importance. This helps search engines understand your site better.
• There should be a clear separation of content (HTML) and formatting/style (CSS). Older sites (5+ years old) will fail in this regard, as this is a (somewhat) newer practice. Even today, some web developers aren’t diligent in this regard.

Next, there are a few additional files or features your site should have:

• 301 Permanent Redirect. This tells Google and others that a website at one URL can actually be found at another URL. The most common example is redirecting mysite.com to www.mysite.com. Without this 301 redirect, search engines treat those two URLs as separate sites. This can dramatically reduce the SEO impact of multiple links to your site from other websites. For example, if you have 50 sites linking to you using the URL www.mysite.com, and another 50 sites linking to you at mysite.com (no www), Google will only give you “credit” for 50 inbound links. But with a 301 redirect, Google knows and credits you for 100 inbound links. And inbound links are the single biggest driver of search engine optimization.
• sitemap.xml. This file gives search engines information about the structure of your site and also lets them know when parts of your site have been updated.
• robots.txt. This file give instructions to search engines like Google about what they should and shouldn’t add to their search engines. It’s primarily used to tell Google to ignore particular directories of files on your site that don’t include actual content that you want showing up in searches. The robots.txt file can also be used to tell Google that you have a sitemap.xml file and where to find it.

What does SiteValet do about these things?

1. SiteValet websites use well-structured, valid HTML and CSS. We properly separate content (HTML) from style (CSS). We test our code on multiple browsers and devices to ensure your website displays properly.
2. We automatically create a 301 Permanent Redirect for the www.mysite.com and mysite.com URLs of your site. We’ll also create additional redirects for any other domain names you may have registered that you want pointing to your main site.
3. We automatically generate a sitemap.xml file for your site and we submit it to Google and Yahoo. The sitemap.xml file is automatically updated anytime you make changes to your site.
4. We automatically create the robots.txt file, with all relevant entries.

Further reading:

• Blizzard Internet Marketing’s 5 Invisible Things. Trent mentions some other best practices, too. We cover them, too, but I’ll write about them in separate posts.