I am near the completion of a website project. Part of the agreement I had with my web developer was that the site would be fully search engine optimized.

My questions is how do I know this has been done correctly and that my content will be searchable on the search engines?

If it is to do with the address bar for the web pages a lot of the site does not seem to have the correct descriptions but things like id28 etc on the end.

Any advice welcome

Thanks

Having a good title is VERY important, so if you've got titles that make no sense, that is not a good sign.

Another fairly important piece to have is a good description in the meta description tag. It should describe what the page is about and not be too long.

Does the content have real headings - ie; h1, h2, h3 tags ?
Does every image that is not just decoration have an alt attribute defined ?

These are just a few things to look for. Some of our SEO gurus can add more

LadynRed, thank you for your reply. I also have a website that I need to finish. I want to make sure everything is set before I finally upload online.

I hope more tips would be given here.

Adding to the advice by LNR, I just answered a similar post shown here -- perhaps the answers given will be of help.

Fully optimized would be hard to define, since there is always more that could be done. For purposes of my response, I am limiting this to on-site, or passive, optimization.

In addition to the previous great tips:

1. View it through a text-only browser (Lynx comes to mind http://lynx.browser.org/). This will give you a good idea what search engines will "see."
2. Anchor text should be descriptive within your own site. Try to have the link attached to a descriptive phrase rather than "click here."
3. Keywords in URL's. Ideally it would look like:
   http://www.example.com/keyword-rich-url
   but something like:
   http://www.example.com/index.php?title=Keyword+Rich+URL
   is OK, too.
   http://www.example.com/index.php?id=28
   doesn't help at all.
4. Help Google help you, submit a sitemap, http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/
5. While there is doubt on the value of keyword meta tags, description meta tags are still used. They may not weigh heavily, but are still valuable.
6. Have well-written relevant content on the page that includes keywords that you are going after. This helps search engines, but REALLY helps users.
7. Last but not least, in fact, more important than ANY other factor -- know which keywords to go after. If this isn't right, then the best optimization efforts will be in vain. It doesn't matter that you are #1 in Google for the phrase "best web designer who uses pink and purple poka-dots in Lucedale, Mississippi," if no one is searching for that. For example, Church by the Glades, appears on the first page (within top ten) for "coral springs church" on Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

I am not one to tear apart someone else's work, (in a mean way) but feel free to post a link to the site in question, and (time permitting) I give some suggestions. I only ask, that in fairness to your developer, you "nicely" make him/her aware of potential improvements, not blast him/her with "you should have done ______."

I hope this helps.

it takes a while to register but by reading other posts i surmise that for newbie websites, the best way is to get back links from websites that have content matching the page you want linked. google bots love this, when the bot sees two sites linked together it wets its lips when it also sees loads of words matching on the two different sites. Guaranteed to get good indexing.

ofcourse, persuading the other site to put your link on is a whole different ballgame. For my site, I'm just going to plaster myself on as many forums to do with music and guitars as is humanly possible, so these back links will spread like a virus through word of mouth and traffic should theoretically increase exponentially. Just remember it only takes one person to tell someone else and the viral campaign begins.

for your clients site just whack in google urchin, submit it to a few directories and leave it be. it's upto the client to drive the site, not you.