Hi guys,

I have just finished up the first phase of the Search Engine Optimasation of Spree4.com.

I thought it may be useful to put down my findings.

• Internal Links are your friends!

I fell into the trap of using onclick=”window.location=''” for a lot of the in site navigation, bad times! The bread and butter of SEO is the use of simple anchor tag links. So everywhere appropriate should have an "a tag” even if you put the style to color:#000000; text-decoration:none; .

• Header tags!

Something often missed out these days. Who needs to use Header tags on a modern website designed using the most recent methods and practices? The web designer who wants to SEO that's who. Put one "h1 tag” around your main information. Then use the other tags h2 onwards to pick out other keywords. Use style=”display:inline;font-size:1em;” to stop the tags effecting your styling.

• Meta tags!

The keywords and description meta tags. Need appropriate content. Simple.

• Sitemaps!

Sitemaps are used by the search engines to ensure they index every part of your site even if there are parts that aren't linked to directly, ie they are accessed through data entry forms or results of a search etc. The form the sitemaps take is an xml file placed in the root of your site and referenced in your robots.txt. They take the form

Again goto town if the page exists and doesn't need to be logged in to access it put it in your sitemap. Once done don't wait for them to find it submit them to the search engines.

Also make a simple sitemap page on your site like here. Its useful for the users of the site and adds a few sneaky links onto your site.

• Content

Seems stupid but make sure there is a decent amount of content on your pages. In an age of Image rich websites its easy to leave off keyword rich text content. See new Spree4 news on the homepage here.