32 Most Important SEO Tips

[h1dayah]

"Entireweb Newsletter * August 7, 2008 * ISSUE #464

32 Most Important SEO Tips

Following these simple tips will definitely boost your traffic and search engine rankings for free.

1. Make sure your site is not under construction, incomplete, with little or no unique content.

2. When your site is ready, submit it to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com. Consider also submitting to other search engine but most of them are powered by these four leading search engines. Submit also your site to reputable high PR web directories, open directories, yellow pages and social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, furl, etc.

3. Submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com (sitemap for search engines usually in XML format)

4. Offer sitemap to your site visitors for easy page navigation. (sitemap for visitors in HTML format)

5. Create unique and rich content sites. Avoid duplicate content. Do not create multiple pages, sub-domains, domains, mirror sites or sites with different domain names but same content.

6. Check your keywords and make sure they are relevant and actually are contained in your site. Avoid keywords stuffing.

7. Use text instead of images in your content, links and important subjects.

8. Make your TITLE and ALT tags descriptive, simple and keyword rich. Avoid irrelevant and repeated keywords.

9. Title tag should be 60-80 characters maximum length.

10. Meta tag description should be 160-180 characters including spaces. (about 25-30 words)

11. Meta Tag keywords must be 15-20 words maximum.

12. Optimize Pages with Headings (H1, H2, H3..) containing your site's primary keywords.

13. Validate your CSS and HTML. Check for errors and broken links.

14. If your site contains dynamic pages(i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), make sure you use SEO friendly URLs. Search engines' spiders having difficulty indexing dynamic pages.

15. Maximum links per page must be fewer than 100. Avoid the risk of being flagged as link farm by search engines.

16. Use Lynx as text browser to check your site. (Lynx source distribution directory)

17. Allow search bots (good ones) to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site.

18. Check your web server/host if it supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. It tells search engines whether your content has changed since last crawled your site. It will save you bandwidth, resources and avoid server overload.

19. Use Robots.txt file to manage and control search engine spiders in indexing your site. You can allow and disallow spiders and choose directories you want to be crawled and indexed. But with bad bots or spam bots you need to modify your HTACCESS file to properly and effectively manage bots or spiders. Visit The Web Robots Pages to learn more about Robots.txt file.

20. Do not attempt to present different content to search engines than what you show to your site visitors.

21. Avoid dirty tricks and exploiting loop holes to improve search engines ranking.

22. Avoid links to bad neighborhood such as web spammers, link farms, phishing, hacker, crack, gambling, porn and scam sites. Linking to them will greatly affects your search engine rankings.

23. Do not attempt to join in link schemes, excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging and link exchange web rings.

24. Do not use unauthorized programs or online tools to submit your site, check page rankings and other automated queries. Avoid the risk of being flagged as spam.

25. Do not use hidden text and links. Show to search engines what you show to your vistors. It will greatly affect your site's reputation.

26. Do not attempt to create pages that contains phishing, scam, viruses, trojans, backdoors, spyware, adware and other malicious programs.

27. Make your site useful and informative.

28. Improve your link building. Link to high PR websites. Quality of relevant links are far more important than quantity. Links will greatly improve your site's visibility, popularity and rankings. Search engines consider links as votes to your site.

29. Check your page link structure. Every page should be reachable by a single static text link.

30. Be extra careful in purchasing SEO services. Some uses illegal and questionable ways to improve rankings.

31. Do not buy or sell links.

32. Do not create sites that contains purely affiliate links and no valuable content that are useful to the users.

I hope these tips will add more popularity and visibility to your site. Enjoy!

Edwin Reyes is a Web Developer and the Webmaster of Findmesoftware.com, a Philippine based website that provides free software downloads, tools, reviews, online tips, blogging resources, tutorials and Free SEO Tools and Software Download. "

[shiraziscool]

Thanks for the great list :-)
They will surely help!

[edwinreyes]

thanks for posting this great list.I hope this will be a great help especially for the newbies.

[Billy Deakin]

Good list H1dayah, only comment I would make is re:

Originally Posted by h1dayah

2. When your site is ready, submit it to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com. Consider also submitting to other search engine but most of them are powered by these four leading search engines. Submit also your site to reputable high PR web directories, open directories, yellow pages and social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, furl, etc.

Not necessary, and in fact could slow down your site getting indexed. Better to get a couple of backlinks and let the search engines find you naturally... You can get a brand new site indexed by Google within 2 hours doing this, while if you use their submission tool it can take a lot longer!

Bill

[crystalq]

Originally Posted by Billy Deakin

Good list H1dayah, only comment I would make is re:



Not necessary, and in fact could slow down your site getting indexed. Better to get a couple of backlinks and let the search engines find you naturally... You can get a brand new site indexed by Google within 2 hours doing this, while if you use their submission tool it can take a lot longer!

Bill

Yeah thats right, submit your site or post
to digg and other social news sites for
fast indexing.

[askloz]

Thanks for your "attempt" to help others, that shows how much of a person you are, a giving one...

however, as a SEO Professional, I'd like to correct you on some false myths that you have been lead to believe in.

Originally Posted by h1dayah

3. Submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com (sitemap for search engines usually in XML format)

DO NOT submit your website to search engines.

Search engines have PERFECT ability to find your pages without extra assistance such as submitting your sitemap.

if you want to submit sitemaps to a search engine, why not do it the correct way and save many hours in the process.

create a ROR.XML file and add the necessary information to your header tag, the search engine bot will then read this file.

faster indexing and even more precise

Originally Posted by h1dayah

4. Offer sitemap to your site visitors for easy page navigation. (sitemap for visitors in HTML format)

Not needed, if a site's structure is created properly, then there is no cause for a human site map. However, I agree, having one, does help in SE Rankings, but it needs to be structured properly.

Originally Posted by h1dayah

7. Use text instead of images in your content, links and important subjects.

Sir, total nonsense.

Please explain why several of my home pages with sliced images as many as 50, rank for the phrases in top to 5th position on yahoo, google, msn with just images?

Who ever told you this myth, is wrong, use ALT text... another tip, link it to another pages.

Originally Posted by h1dayah

11. Meta Tag keywords must be 15-20 words maximum.

Don't use keyword meta tags, it doesn't improve your rankings.

Originally Posted by h1dayah

14. If your site contains dynamic pages(i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), make sure you use SEO friendly URLs. Search engines' spiders having difficulty indexing dynamic pages.

MYTH... Google as of about 8 months or so ago, they do INDEX pages with 3 or 4 more parameters after the ? mark.

However, I agree, they should be SE friendly... these should be done with .htaccess re-writes.

Originally Posted by h1dayah

15. Maximum links per page must be fewer than 100. Avoid the risk of being flagged as link farm by search engines.

Totally false. More links you have on your pages directed to other pages of relevancy, in fact helps rankings. take wikipedia site for instance.

Originally Posted by h1dayah

20. Do not attempt to present different content to search engines than what you show to your site visitors.

Search engines have no way to detect this if it's a cloned link, unless otherwise reported manually or a member of google found out by manual review.

Originally Posted by h1dayah

28. Improve your link building. Link to high PR websites. Quality of relevant links are far more important than quantity. Links will greatly improve your site's visibility, popularity and rankings. Search engines consider links as votes to your site.

Not "always" necessary, but in the most part, I agree.. however..

PR0 pages linked to PR0 pages that are highly relevant can still out rank sites that you recommend.

Pr is just a measure of importance of a site, from site to site, over a period of time.

Originally Posted by h1dayah

32. Do not create sites that contains purely affiliate links and no valuable content that are useful to the users.

Crikey, with that advice, I'd be skint.

A LOT of my sites, over 400 of them, all have affiliate links on them, tell me, why do I make over $20k a month with HEAPS of affiliate links on my site's pages? .. hmm


Any ways up, great effort so far, a score of 67 out of 100...

[Kelvin Brown]

Loz, you did a great job on providing updates to the post.

However, I take small exception to one point:


<Quote:>
Originally Posted by h1dayah View Post

11. Meta Tag keywords must be 15-20 words maximum.
Don't use keyword meta tags, it doesn't improve your rankings.</Quote:>

If you already have a description, it can take less than 30 seconds to plugin 5 to 10 keywords. For most of the major search engines, it can be shown that they really don't care. But I have yet to see one penalize you for having a proper keyword tag. By proper, I basically mean that it is not stuff with 100's of keywords.

So, at a minimum, the keyword tag used properly, does not hurt, the question is does it help. As far as Google and Yahoo are concerned, who knows when they will change again, and start reading keyword tags? So, for right now, you can legally, (meaning within the rules of the search engines) add a few extra targeted words to your pages.

Now, for the biggie, there are thousands of smaller, niche search / directories, that do use keywords. And as a person who runs these types of sites, I have at times denied up to 50% of submissions because the person did not include keyword tags, and had an incomplete description.

Those who added the keyword take saved me time in trying to make sure that their submission was placed in the proper, category. Those submissions typically started out with an advantage.

Since it takes only a small amount of time, it is worth it to add keywords.

kelvin

[askloz]

Kelvin, dude, no one said you would get penalized for having a keyword meta tag. Google just doesn't use it to rank pages due to previous manipulations it once had when it was included in google's alogo'.

The only time google will use the keyword meta tag, is for showing the correct ads for adsense pages (amongst other elements) and pay per click with adwords.. other than that, if people feel that it helps in the terms of ranking a page, then they're climbing up the wrong tree.

[h1dayah]

Originally Posted by askloz

Kelvin, dude, no one said you would get penalized for having a keyword meta tag. Google just doesn't use it to rank pages due to previous manipulations it once had when it was included in google's alogo'.

The only time google will use the keyword meta tag, is for showing the correct ads for adsense pages (amongst other elements) and pay per click with adwords.. other than that, if people feel that it helps in the terms of ranking a page, then they're climbing up the wrong tree.

Thank you guy.....i do really appreciated all the idea comes up..............its got me more .............

[Kelvin Brown]

Originally Posted by Kelvin Brown

But I have yet to see one penalize you for having a proper keyword tag. By proper, I basically mean that it is not stuff with 100's of keywords.

kelvin

askloz, Excuse my lack separation.

That was put in my be for clarification, as to proper use. It was not meant to be attributed to you.

Since I was advocating adding keywords, I wanted to make sure it was done properly. I will agree at this time that it does not appear to help in ranking, but since it can help in other areas, as you noted, why not take 20 seconds and add one or two.

Kelvin

[flashgordon]

Good list. I would also argue that #14 is not really valid any more. I have a site that uses PHP and does not use a SEO friendly URL plugin (couldn't get it to work properly). Google has had no trouble indexing the individual pages this way. It may have been true, but I think search engines understand that more and more sites are going this way so they need to be able to deal with dynamic pages.

[edwinreyes]

hi! regarding tip #14 .... SEO friendly URLs... My question is why Wordpress uses permalink in the form of SEO friendly urls (easy to read and remember urls)....they are just following the Google guidelines?

These tips are in general.... adapted to different search engines and not for Google alone...

[edwinreyes]

This forum uses SEO friendly urls

sample:

"http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/4436-32-most-important-search-engine-optimization-tips.html#post44771...."

The advantage of this type of urls... is that ... not just friendly to search engines but also to humans... Even humans can read and remember this url.... compared to those %???%%$$$....

This is only a simple way for the users to remember our sites...especially when the user don't know how to bookmark a web page/site...

[Tony_D]

Originally Posted by Billy Deakin

Good list H1dayah, only comment I would make is re:



Not necessary, and in fact could slow down your site getting indexed. Better to get a couple of backlinks and let the search engines find you naturally... You can get a brand new site indexed by Google within 2 hours doing this, while if you use their submission tool it can take a lot longer!

Bill

Very true. I had one NMOC site I was working on that had a page-1 ranking in google within a few days of promotion. I never indexed the site with google, not once.

On the other hand, a rather large content site I'm currently working on has at least a dozen high-PR backlinks, 4 articles with backlinks and a very thorough Squidoo page linking to it. I submitted it to Google immediately after I got the index page up and running. Google last spidered it... August 5th. Very annoying. However, I am excited to wake up one day and see that my site has jumped from non-existant to the first or second page for a moderately competitive search term.

So in short, DONT index your page with search engines. Digg your site, twitter it, facebook it, add a squidoo page, etc. Article submissions with backlinks are also very powerful, as you probably already know.