1 - Keywords in -title- tag
This is one of the most
important places to have a keyword because what is written inside the
<title> tag
shows in search results as your page title. The title tag must be short (6 or 7
words at most) and the keyword must be near the beginning.
Keywords in URLs help a
lot - e.g. - http://domainname.com/seo-services.html, where “SEO services” is the keyword phrase you
attempt to rank well for. But if you don't have the keywords in other parts of
the document, don't rely on having them in the URL.
3 - Keyword density in
document text
Another very important
factor you need to check. 3-7 % for major keywords is best, 1 for minor. Keyword density of over 1 % is
suspicious and looks more like keyword stuffing, than a naturally written text.
4 - Keywords
in anchor text
Also very important,
especially for the anchor text of inbound links, because if you have the keyword in the anchor text in a link
from another site, this is regarded as getting a vote from this site not only
about your site in general, but about the keyword in particular.
5 - Keywords in headings
(<H1>, <H2>, etc. tags)
One more place where
keywords count a lot. But beware that your page has actual text about the
particular keyword.
6 - Keywords in the
beginning of a document
Also counts, though not
as much as anchor text, title tag or headings. However, have in mind that the
beginning of a document does not necessarily mean the first paragraph – for
instance if you use tables, the first paragraph of text might be in the second
half of the table.
7 - Keywords in
<alt> tags
Spiders don't read
images but they do read their textual descriptions in the <alt> tag, so
if you have images on your page, fill in the <alt> tag with some keywords
about them.
Less and less important,
especially for Google. Yahoo! and Bing still rely on them, so if you are
optimizing for Yahoo! or Bing, fill these tags properly. In any case, filling
these tags properly will not hurt, so do it.
Keyword proximity
measures how close in the text the keywords are. It is best if they are
immediately one after the other (e.g. “dog food”), with no other words between
them. For instance, if you have “dog” in the first paragraph and “food” in the
third paragraph, this also counts but not as much as having the phrase “dog
food” without any other words in between. Keyword proximity is applicable for
keyword phrases that consist of 2 or more words.
In addition to keywords,
you can optimize for keyword phrases that consist of several words – e.g. “SEO
services”. It is best when the keyword phrases you optimize for are popular
ones, so you can get a lot of exact matches of the search string but sometimes
it makes sense to optimize for 2 or 3 separate keywords (“SEO” and “services”)
than for one phrase that might occasionally get an exact match.
Optimizing for secondary
keywords can be a golden mine because when everybody else is optimizing for the
most popular keywords, there will be less competition (and probably more hits)
for pages that are optimized for the minor words. For instance, “real estate
new jersey” might have thousand times less hits than “real estate” only but if
you are operating in New Jersey, you will get less but considerably better
targeted traffic.
For English this is not
so much of a factor because words that stem from the same root (e.g. dog, dogs,
doggy, etc.) are considered related and if you have “dog” on your page, you
will get hits for “dogs” and “doggy” as well, but for other languages keywords
stemming could be an issue because different words that stem from the same root
are considered as not related and you might need to optimize for all of them.
Optimizing for synonyms
of the target keywords, in addition to the main keywords. This is good for
sites in English, for which search engines are smart enough to use synonyms as
well, when ranking sites but for many other languages synonyms are not taken
into account, when calculating rankings and relevancy.
Spelling errors are very
frequent and if you know that your target keywords have popular misspellings or
alternative spellings (i.e. Christmas and Xmas), you might be tempted to
optimize for them. Yes, this might get you some more traffic but having
spelling mistakes on your site does not make a good impression, so you'd better
don't do it, or do it only in the metatags.
When you are optimizing
for an excessive amount of keywords, especially unrelated ones, this will
affect the performance of all your keywords and even the major ones will be
lost (diluted) in the text.
Any artificially
inflated keyword density (1 % and over) is keyword stuffing and you risk
getting banned from search engines.
Links - Internal, Inbound, Outbound
17 - Anchor text of
inbound links
As discussed in the
Keywords section, this is one of the most important factors for good rankings.
It is best if you have a keyword in the anchor text but even if you don't, it
is still OK.
18 - Origin of inbound links
Besides the anchor text,
it is important if the site that links to you is a reputable one or not.
Generally sites with greater Google PR are considered reputable.
19 - Links from similar
sites
Having links from
similar sites is very, very useful. It indicates that the competition is voting
for you and you are popular within your topical community.
20 - Links from .edu and
.gov sites
These links are precious
because .edu and .gov sites are more reputable than .com. .biz, .info, etc.
domains. Additionally, such links are hard to obtain.
Generally the more, the
better. But the reputation of the sites that link to you is more important than
their number. Also important is their anchor text, is there a keyword in it,
how old are they, etc.
22 - Anchor text of
internal links
This also matters,
though not as much as the anchor text of inbound links.
23 - Around-the-anchor
text
The text that is
immediately before and after the anchor text also matters because it further
indicates the relevance of the link – i.e. if the link is artificial or it
naturally flows in the text.
24 - Age of inbound
links
The older, the better.
Getting many new links in a short time suggests buying them.
25 - Links from
directories
Great, though it
strongly depends on which directories. Being listed in DMOZ, Yahoo Directory
and similar directories is a great boost for your ranking but having tons of
links from PR directories is useless and
it can even be regarded as link spamming, if you have hundreds or thousands of
such links.
26 - Number of outgoing
links on the page that links to you
The fewer, the better
for you because this way your link looks more important.
Named anchors (the
target place of internal links) are useful for internal navigation but are also
useful for SEO because you stress additionally that a particular page,
paragraph or text is important. In the code, named anchors look like this:
<A href= “#dogs”>Read about dogs</A> and “#dogs” is the named
anchor.
28 - IP address of
inbound link
Google denies that they discriminate against links that
come from the same IP address or C class of addresses, so for Google the IP
address can be considered neutral to the weight of inbound links. However, Bing
and Yahoo! may discard links from the same IPs or IP classes, so it is always
better to get links from different IPs.
29 - Inbound links from
link farms and other suspicious sites
This does not affect you
in any way, provided that the links are not reciprocal. The idea is that it is
beyond your control to define what a link farm links to, so you don't get
penalized when such sites link to you because this is not your fault but in any
case you'd better stay away from link farms and similar suspicious sites.
Google does not like
pages that consists mainly of links, so you'd better keep them under 1 per
page. Having many outgoing links does not get you any benefits in terms of
ranking and could even make your situation worse.
31 - Excessive linking,
link spamming
It is bad for your
rankings, when you have many links to/from the same sites (even if it is not a
cross- linking scheme or links to bad neighbors) because it suggests link
buying or at least spamming. In the best case only some of the links are taken
into account for SEO rankings.
32 - Outbound links to
link farms and other suspicious sites
Unlike inbound links
from link farms and other suspicious sites, outbound links to bad neighbors can drown you. You need periodically to check the status of
the sites you link to because sometimes good sites become bad neighbors and
vice versa.
Cross-linking occurs
when site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site C links back to
site A. This is the simplest example but more complex schemes are possible.
Cross-linking looks like disguised reciprocal link trading and is penalized.
when you have a link
that is a pixel or so wide it is invisible for humans, so nobody will click on
it and it is obvious that this link is an attempt to manipulate search engines.
35 - <Description>
metatag
Metatags are becoming
less and less important but if there are metatags that still matter, these are
the <description> and <keywords> ones. Use the <Description>
metatag to write the description of your site. Besides the fact that metatags
still rock on Bing and Yahoo!, the <Description> metatag has one more
advantage – it sometimes pops in the description of your site in search
results.
The <Keywords>
metatag also matters, though as all metatags it gets almost no attention from
Google and some attention from Bing and Yahoo! Keep the metatag reasonably long
– 1 to 2 keywords at most. Don't stuff the
<Keywords> tag with keywords that you don't have on the page, this is bad
for your rankings.
If your site is
language-specific, don't leave this tag empty. Search engines have more
sophisticated ways of determining the language of a page than relying on the
<language>metatag but they still consider it.
The <Refresh>
metatag is one way to redirect visitors from your site to another. Only do it
if you have recently migrated your site to a new domain and you need to
temporarily redirect visitors. When used for a long time, the <refresh>
metatag is regarded as unethical practice and this can hurt your ratings. In
any case, redirecting through 3 1 is much better.
Having more content
(relevant content, which is different from the content on other sites both in
wording and topics) is a real boost for your site's rankings.
40 - Frequency of
content change
Frequent changes are
favored. It is great when you constantly add new content but it is not so great
when you only make small updates to existing content.
When a keyword in the
document text is in a larger font size in comparison to other on-page text,
this makes it more noticeable, so therefore it is more important than the rest
of the text. The same applies to headings (<h1>, <h2>, etc.), which
generally are in larger font size than the rest of the text.
Bold and italic are
another way to emphasize important words and phrases. However, use bold, italic
and larger font sizes within reason because otherwise you might achieve just
the opposite effect.
Recent documents (or at
least regularly updated ones) are favored.
Generally long pages are
not favored, or at least you can achieve better rankings if you have 3 short
rather than 1 long page on a given topic, so split long pages into multiple
smaller ones.
From a marketing point
of view content separation (based on IP, browser type, etc.) might be great but
for SEO it is bad because when you have one URL and differing content, search
engines get confused what the actual content of the page is.
46 -Poor coding and
design
Search engines say that
they do not want poorly designed and coded sites, though there are hardly sites
that are banned because of messy code or ugly images but when the design and/or
coding of a site is poor, the site might not be indexable at all, so in this
sense poor code and design can harm you a lot.
Using other people's
copyrighted content without their permission or using content that promotes
legal violations can get you kicked out of search engines.
This is a black hat SEO
practice and when spiders discover that you have text specially for them but
not for humans, don't be surprised by the penalty.
Cloaking is another
illegal technique, which partially involves content separation because spiders
see one page (highly-optimized, of course), and everybody else is presented
with another version of the same page.
Creating pages that aim
to trick spiders that your site is a highly-relevant one when it is not, is
another way to get the kick from search engines.
When you have the same
content on several pages on the site, this will not make your site look larger
because the duplicate content penalty kicks in. To a lesser degree duplicate
content applies to pages that reside on other sites but obviously these cases
are not always banned – i.e. article directories or mirror sites do exist and
prosper.
If used wisely, it will
not hurt. But if your main content is displayed through JavaScript, this makes
it more difficult for spiders to follow and if JavaScript code is a mess and
spiders can't follow it, this will definitely hurt your ratings.
Having a text-only site
is so boring but having many images and no text is a SEO sin. Always provide in
the <alt> tag a meaningful description of an image but don't stuff it
with keywords or irrelevant information.
Podcasts and videos are
becoming more and more popular but as with all non-textual goodies, search
engines can't read them, so if you don't have the tapescript of the podcast or
the video, it is as if the podcast or movie is not there because it will not be
indexed by search engines.
55 - Images instead of
text links
Using images instead of
text links is bad, especially when you don't fill in the <alt> tag. But
even if you fill in the <alt> tag, it is not the same as having a bold,
underlined, 16-pt. link, so use images for navigation only if this is really
vital for the graphic layout of your site.
Frames are very, very
bad for SEO. Avoid using them unless really necessary.
Spiders don't index the
content of Flash movies, so if you use Flash on your site, don't forget to give
it an alternative textual description.
Fortunately this
epidemic disease seems to have come to an end. Having a Flash home page (and
sometimes whole sections of your site) and no HTML version, is a SEO suicide.
Domains, URLs, Web
Mastery
59 - Keyword-rich URLs and filenames
A very important factor,
especially for Yahoo! and Bing.
Another fundamental
issue, which that is often neglected. If the site (or separate pages) is
unaccessible because of broken links, 4 4 errors, password-protected areas and
other similar reasons, then the site simply can't be indexed.
It is great to have a
complete and up-to-date sitemap, spiders love it, no matter if it is a plain old HTML sitemap or
the special Google sitemap format.
Spiders love large
sites, so generally it is the bigger, the better. However, big sites become
user-unfriendly and difficult to navigate, so sometimes it makes sense to
separate a big site into a couple of smaller ones. On the other hand, there are
hardly sites that are penalized because they are 1 , + pages, so don't split your size in pieces
only because it is getting larger and larger.
Similarly to wine, older sites are respected more. The idea is that an old, established site is
more trustworthy (they have been around and are here to stay) than a new site
that has just poped up and might soon disappear.
It is not only keywords
in URLs and on page that matter. The site theme is even more important for good
ranking because when the site fits into one theme, this boosts the rankings of
all its pages that are related to this theme.
65 - File Location on
Site
File location is
important and files that are located in the root directory or near it tend to
rank better than files that are buried 5 or more levels below.
66 - Domains versus
subdomains, separate domains
Having a separate domain
is better – i.e. instead of having blablabla.blogspot.com, register a separate blablabla.com
domain.
67 - Top-level domains
(TLDs)
Not all TLDs are equal.
There are TLDs that are better than others. For instance, the most popular TLD
– .com – is much better than .ws, .biz, or .info domains but (all equal)
nothing beats an old .edu or .org domain.
Hyphens between the
words in an URL increase readability and help with SEO rankings. This applies
both to hyphens in domain names and in the rest of the URL.
Generally doesn't matter
but if it is a very long URL-s, this starts to look spammy, so avoid having
more than 1 words in the URL (3 or 4 for
the domain name itself and 6 or 7 for the rest of address is acceptable).
Could matter only for
shared hosting or when a site is hosted with a free hosting provider, when the
IP or the whole C-class of IP addresses is blacklisted due to spamming or other
illegal practices.
71 - Adsense will boost
your ranking
Adsense is not related
in any way to SEO ranking. Google will definitely not give you a ranking bonus
because of hosting Adsense ads. Adsense might boost your income but this has
nothing to do with your search rankings.
72 - Adwords will boost
your ranking
Similarly to Adsense,
Adwords has nothing to do with your search rankings. Adwords will bring more
traffic to your site but this will not affect your rankings in whatsoever way.
Hosting downtime is directly related to accessibility
because if a site is frequently down, it can't be indexed. But in practice this
is a factor only if your hosting provider is really unreliable and has less
than 97-98% uptime.
Spiders prefer static
URLs, though you will see many dynamic pages on top positions. Long dynamic
URLs (over 1 character) are really bad and in any case you'd better use a tool
to rewrite dynamic URLs in something more human- and SEO-friendly.
This is even worse than
dynamic URLs. Don't use session IDs for information that you'd like to be
indexed by spiders.
If indexing of a
considerable portion of the site is banned, this is likely to affect the no
banned part as well because spiders will come less frequently to a “noindex”
site.
77 - Redirects (301 and
302)
When not applied
properly, redirects can hurt a lot – the target page might not
open, or worse – a redirect can be regarded as a black hat technique, when the
visitor is immediately taken to a different page.
It’s simple to run some search, see that your website has
gone and assume the worst. Whereas Google will report some spamming offenses
through Google Webmaster Central, it tells me there’s no method currently to log-in
and recognize if the Penguin Update hit you.
