Search Engine Optimization Technique
Search Engine Optimization Rules
Here is a checklist of the factors that affect your rankings with Google, Bing, Yahoo! and the other search engines.
| Keywords | ||
| 1 | Keyword in Domain name | This helps lot in your page ranking. If you are searching any Keyword, search engine gives priority domain name starting with those keywords. It is good idea to place your main keyword in the domain name directly or Same as in page-name-with-hyphens |
| 2 | 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.Search engines only examine a certain amount of data, and when it comes to title tags it is our experience that spiders will probably only check the first 60 to 70 characters – including spaces. It is therefore best to keep title tags short and specific. |
| Keyword in Title tag | It is helpful to have unique title tags for each page on a site. This is also very useful when a site wants to do well in searches for multiple keywords.If a keyword is in a web page’s title tag, make sure that the page is actually about the keyword. Search engines will check the content of the page and expect it to match the <TITLE> tags. | |
| 2 | Keywords in URL | Keywords in URLs help a lot – e.g. – http://www.vitsusa.com.com/vista-it-solutions.html, where “vista it solutions” 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, 1-2 for minor. Keyword density of over 10% 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. Anchor text shows like… |
| 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. |
| 8 | Keywords in metatags | Less important, especially for Google. But Yahoo! and Bing still rely on them, so if you are optimizing for Yahoo! or Bing, fill these tags properly. |
| 9 | Keyword proximity | 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. |
| 10 | Keyword dilution | 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. |
| Metatags | ||
| 1 | <Description> metatag | Metatags are becoming 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. It should be not more than 200 Characters. |
| 2 | <Keywords> metatag | 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 – 10 to 20 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. Every word in this tag MUST appear somewhere in the body text |
| 3 | <Language> metatag | 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. |
| 4 | <Refresh> metatag | 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 301 is much better. |
| Content | ||
| 1 | Unique content | 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. |
| 2 | File size | 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. |
| 3 | 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. |
| 4 | Duplicate content | 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. |
| Links – internal, inbound, outbound | ||
| 1 | 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. |
| 2 | 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. |
| 3 | 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. |
| 4 | 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. |
| 5 | Number of backlinks | Generally more is 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. |
| 6 | Anchor text of internal links | This also matters, though not as much as the anchor text of inbound links. |
| 7 | 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. |
| 8 | 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. |
| 9 | Named anchors | 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. |
| 10 | 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. |
| 11 | Many outgoing links | Google does not like a page that consists mainly of links, so you’d better keep them under 100 per page. Having many outgoing links does not get you any benefits in terms of ranking and could even make your situation worse. |
| 12 | 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. |
| 13 | 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. |
| 14 | Cross-linking | 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. |
| Domains, URLs, Web Mastery | ||
| 1 | Keyword-rich URLs and filenames | A very important factor, especially for Yahoo! and Bing. |
| 2 | Site Accessibility | Another fundamental issue, which that is often neglected. If the site (or separate pages) is unaccessible because of broken links, 404 errors, password-protected areas and other similar reasons, then the site simply can’t be indexed. |
| 3 | Sitemap | 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. |
| 4 | Site size | 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 10,000+ pages, so don’t split your size in pieces only because it is getting larger and larger. |
| 5 | Site age | 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. |
| 6 | Site theme | 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. |
| 7 | 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. |
| 8 | Hyphens in URLs | 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. |
| Visual Extras and SEO | ||
| 1 | JavaScript | 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. |
| 2 | Images in text | 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. |
| 3 | Podcasts and videos | 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. |
| 4 | 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. |
| 5 | Frames | Frames are very, very bad for SEO. Avoid using them unless really necessary. |
| 6 | Flash | 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. |
| 7 | A Flash home page | 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. |
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