32 Most Important SEO Tips

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"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. "
#search engine optimization #important #seo #tips
  • Thanks for the great list :-)
    They will surely help!
    • [1] reply
    • thanks for posting this great list.I hope this will be a great help especially for the newbies.
  • 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
    • [4] replies
    • Yeah thats right, submit your site or post
      to digg and other social news sites for
      fast indexing.
    • 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.
      • [1] reply


















    • awesome tips, I would also add to be sure to ping your sitemaps when there are changes to content.
      • [1] reply
  • 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.


    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



    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.

    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.

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


    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.





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

    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.



    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.

    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...
    • [ 3 ] Thanks
    • [1] reply
    • 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
      • [ 1 ] Thanks
      • [2] replies
  • this one's funny because it isn't necessary. sometimes spiders find your site, it's better to submit it on social bookmarking services
    • [1] reply
    • Yep, I agree in nowadays we don't need to submit to SEs, only broadcast our presences in social sites. that is, let SEs find us, not the other way around, any more.
      • [1] reply
  • Banned
    Hi,

    Thanks for the list .. & thank you for the corrections..cant keep up!!
    • [1] reply
    • That's a long list. Got some points which I did not knew before. Thanks for sharing it with us.
      • [1] reply
  • Pertaining to #31 on the list (selling links)... as an unrelated (perhaps) thread/question, I am wondering if selling text links can drop page rank?

    My site www.cooking-solutions.com has run at PR5-6 for several years until a couple months ago when I dropped to PR3. I couldn't figure out why since I have a large content-based site, until I thought about the latest Google slap around the same time. I have tons of links out, and yes, some of them are paid ads. Definitely a small percentage of overall links out, but do any of you know if this would drop my PR since I don't use "nofollow" anywhere in my code?

    Thanks in advance...

    Chef Kevin
    • [1] reply
    • According to Google......

      I think you need to review your backlinks especially the reciprocal links. May be some of your link partners are no longer active, or banned by Google, or they linked to bad neighborhoods, or their PR also dropped.

      You might want to reduce your reciprocals and retain only the best and trusted ones, Better to eliminate them if possible..... and increase your one way links instead.

      to be safe ... use nofollow to all untrusted links.
  • That's an awesome list. Don't agree with them all but I think that the majority are very helpful, esepcially to newbies.
    • [2] replies
    • Thank good posting
    • Hello all i came across the site and i found something interest.

      This just only one paragraph that am cut it off.

      How to Optimize Title Tags
      Optimizing the title tags plays an extremely important role in any search engine optimization campaign. In addition to search engine optimization, well written title tags also help you in increasing the usability of a web page.

      Importance of title tags
      Title tags play three very important roles as described below

      * First and foremost title tags are very important from the search engine point of view. This is because all major and minor search engines place much weightage on these tags (and use these tags to gather information about an website) in comparison to all other aspects
      * Secondly many major search engines like google and yahoo! display title tags of a web page as a heading in their SERPs (Search engine results page) followed by a breif description of the content were the keywords appear
      * The third most important function of title tags is to help the user in finding out which page he is on. Almost all popular browsers including Microsoft Internet Explorer, display title tags on the top bar as well as the bottom. Firefox 1.0 uses title tags to describe 'tabs'. This makes title tags extremely important from the web usability point of view as well.


      for the complete story just follow this link

      How to Optimize Title Tags?

      You will find more usefull information.
      • [1] reply
  • Great list but the title should read "white hat" SEO tips

    Some of the things listed not to do are quite effective for SEO, just considered black hat.

    Gunter
    • [1] reply
    • Banned
      Dear Friend,

      Here I am new member.

      Thank You very much friend for very helpful tips.

      I read it and it will be definitely helpful for me.
    • Banned
      [DELETED]
  • Dang these are some great tips, thanks a bunch for all the followup posts, i love it!
  • These are the old tips almost any seo expert knows. Meta tags don't count anymore . The basic thing is : the more quality links pointing to your site and use a clean HTML navigation .
    • [1] reply
    • Hei been a while .....would you mind to tell me more about "clean html navigation" please............if you have web page that offer free stuff to check it am appreciated.

      thank you..
  • That is very good and comprehensive list for SEM's - great stuff!
  • I think you have covered all basic things ... but as I am new bie so will you please tell me about these two terms ...

    ALT tags
    Lynx as text browser

    Take Care
    • [1] reply
    • 1) Alt attributes

      The alt attribute is used to describe the contents of an image file. It's important for several reasons:

      * Googlebot cannot read text embedded in images. Therefore, alt text is a useful way to give Google information about an image.
      * Many people, for example users with visual impairments, or people who use screen readers, or have low bandwidth connections, cannot see images on web pages. Descriptive alt text provides these users with important information.

      Not so good:

      <img src="puppy.jpg" alt=""/>

      Better:

      <img src="puppy.jpg" alt="puppy"/>

      Best:

      <img src="puppy.jpg" alt="Golden Retriever puppy fetching a stick">

      To be avoided (may cause your site to be perceived as spam):

      <img src="puppy.jpg" alt="puppy dog baby
      dog pup pups puppies doggies pups litter puppies dog retriever
      labrador wolfhound setter pointer puppy jack russell terrier
      puppies dog food cheap dogfood puppy food"/>



      2) Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.


      And this is what they mean (i put my website just as example only)

      Search Engine Simulator





      Example 1: Summary based on all text on page
      Professional People Search - Instant Online Records Retrieval By.Brandsite.org Thu, 11 Sep 2008 11:56:09 GMT, 64092 bytes
      1 Nationwide Databases: - Information on 90% of U.S. Residents - Search Over 250 Million Criminal Records - Over One Billion Records Under Your Fingertips I never knew that so much criminal data is
      Professional People Search - Instant Online Records Retrieval By.Brandsite.org



      Example 2: Summary based on headers only
      Professional People Search - Instant Online Records Retrieval By.Brandsite.org Thu, 11 Sep 2008 11:56:09 GMT, 64092 bytes
      Nationwide Databases: ARE YOU TRYING TO LOCATE A MISSING PERSON? ARE YOU IN SEARCH OF A LONG LOST LOVE, FAMILY MEMBER, OR FRIEND?
      Professional People Search - Instant Online Records Retrieval By.Brandsite.org

      So based on their software this is what it is close to likely search engine look at my site...and i think my site pretty well.


      Hopefully can give you some idea......
      Here is the link for lynx delorie software
  • Banned
    For sure very useful.
    What is a deal with reciprocal links .Most of directories would require those for submittinf.
    Good or bad?
    • [1] reply

    • In my Opinion if you submit it to directories it is good ,but it will nice if you choose high PR as possible, It is not bad or good,they doing this one cause most probably they still new and tend to have lower PR. In order to make they own come up as well since they will get more link submit it to them.And Search Engine like directories cause they tend to be high traffic..DMOZ as a sample.

      Choose wisely when you submit to directories that have high PR then you submit to 10 directories that no have PR.

      All the best.
  • Hey h1dayah

    The way you are replying to each query with the examples and all thats simply superb dear. Hats off to you. I will add you on IM and I hope you will be supportive at there too as you are here.

    You are really doing a great job for a new bie. Would you like to tell us your website also ... so that we can learn from there as well.
    • [1] reply
  • These are the basic tips for any newbie SEO and I am sure new bie will love it. But however you should explore a bit more. Somewhere these are really confusing.
  • Banned
    [DELETED]
    • [1] reply

    • Can you tell the warriors here why its bad advice?
      Some of it might be outdated but, I hardly think its bad advice.

      I'm not an seo expert but, maybe you are, so please enlighten me.
  • Great posts - I feel like I just got a 5 hour class in 36 min (I'm a careful reader). Thank esp to H1dayah for starting the whole thing off and to everyone else for the lively discussion esp Kelvin Brown and Askloz. Hope I can contribute something on these lines soon - in the mean time - for me it's learn and test and learn and test again.
  • You've created a nice sized list for people to get started on. Good to see it- and without the misleading info that's gonna run people into trouble down the track in their SEO efforts!

    Cheers.
  • Hello,

    I have to admit I'm not sure if I agree with the entire list either, but most of them are correct.

    There is a posting here from "akloz" about not submitting your sitemap to the search engines and I definitely don't agree with that person. When you submit your sitemap to Google within the webmaster tools, Google provides you invaluable stats, which can only happen if you submit your sitemap.xml file. Google even encourages you to do so. Not entirely sure why "akloz" feels this is not a good thing. We've seen successes with our client projects.
  • Great tips my friends ... nice Gan
  • Banned
    Good job friend, thanks
  • What a firey subject. I have to say, I'm still confuse with all the conflicting "facts".

    Any suggestions on where I can find relevant and updated information on SEO?
  • nice list,its usefull for people who newly starting seo especially,Thnaks for that list
  • Seo is so vast.

    Just a few things to add, fix , suggest

    Headings should be bold h2 or h3 must contain key term

    Per page only ref to current keyterms

    links no more than 10

    Have complete text sales page as link from pic,

    Make link keyterm in sales letter

    back links to be text based targeting main key term

    Thats about it.

    Brian
  • Should the Meta tag keywords and description be different on every page? Thanks.
  • you can optimize your site even lots of images are included there. That's why, we discovered the essential of alt tags
  • Banned
    I am going to create my own article based on this one.. .. thanks
  • Very good post.
    It is always good to learn something that you didn't know.
  • great post. will for sure use this info. bookmarked for future reference =]
  • SEO tricks:
    Write great content
    Write unique content
    Add new content all the time
    Create a great keyword phrase
    Choose a phrase that is popular, but not too popular
    Write an accessible site
    Use the keyword phrase in your title tag
    Get a domain with your keyword phrase
    Use the keyword phrase in your URL
    Use your keyword phrase a lot, but not too much
    Use your keyword phrase in headlines
    Use your keyword phrase in anchor text of links
    Ask other people for links to your page
    Try to get your keyword phrase inside incoming links
    Try to get links from reputable sites
    Try to get links from similar sites
    Try to get links from .edu, and .gov sites
  • Thanks for the list. Good for complete Newbies, but it is a bit straight laced. You need a little bit of slightly black hat techniques (but done carefully and well) to really excel in SEO in my opinion.
  • This really needs to be put into context. If you're looking to rank for a KW with less than say 500 monthly searches, then........

    Get an exact match domain
    Put the Kewyword in the Title of the site
    Write some decent content
    Buidl a few blog comment links and a couple thousand profile links

    .........you'll be in the top 1-5 positions in no time.

    If you're trying to rank for high searched terms, then yes, it becomes more complicated and requires more work.


    Happy New year
  • Lmao, Loz is SO right. A lot of misinformation here!
  • Very good list. I always keep a copy of "The Art of SEO" on my desk, this is definitely going to be added as a reference list.

    Thanks for sharing h1dayah!

    Regards
    Mamun
  • The SEO tips which you have given is very nice and I am much impressed. Also I want to share some ideas . The SEO ideas are as under:-
    1. Unique Content Writing.
    2. Strong Link Building.
    3. Spreading Right Keyword.
    4. Social Bookmarking.
    5. Blog Writing And Submission.
  • On #2 - manually submitting doesn't seem to work as well for me with Google than having the spider find the site through good backlinks.

    On #21 - "dirty tricks" (not totally sure what this entails other than it's probably anything that isn't "white hat") work well in $$$ for me (among over a couple thousand of my sites). Totally pedestrian view of SEO in my opinion.
  • These are really important tips about the SEO and thanks for sharing it. As i think doing the on page optimization properly really helps to get the quality traffic and the better ranking for the website.
  • great seo tips dude!
  • One important point is missing " Specify your canonical" know about it from google's official blog Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Specify your canonical
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