There are some important factors that affect your website rankings with Google, MSN, Yahoo! and the other search engines. Outlined below are some do’s and don’ts of website optimization.
Most of the items below apply mainly to Google (the most popular search engine) and partially to MSN, Yahoo! and all the other lesser search engines.
Don’t worry if some of this is like a foreign language to you. With Weblife as your website designer you are in good hands.
Some Do’s:
tag:Keywords in
tag shows in search results as your page title. The title tag must be short (6 or 7 words at most) and the the keyword must be near the beginning. This is one of the most important places to have a keyword because what is written inside the
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.
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.
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.
Keywords in tags:
Spiders don’t read images but they do read their textual descriptions in the tag, so if you have images on your page, fill in the tag with some keywords about them.
Keywords in metatags:
Less and less important, especially for Google. Yahoo! and MSN still rely on them, so if you are optimizing for Yahoo! or MSN, fill these tags properly. In any case, filling these tags properly will not hurt, so do it.
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. Keyword proximity is applicable for keyword phrases that consist of 2 or more words.
Keyword phrases:
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.
Secondary keywords:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 PR0 directories is useless and it can even be regarded as link spamming, if you have hundreds or thousands of such links.
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.
Adsense will boost your ranking, or will it?:
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.
Adwords will boost your ranking, or will it?:
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.
Don’t:
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.
Keyword stuffing:
Any artificially inflated keyword density (10% and over) is keyword stuffing and you risk getting banned from search engines.
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.
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.
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:
Cross-linking occurs when site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site A 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.
Single pixel links:
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.
Invisible text:
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:
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.
Doorway pages:
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.
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.
Frames:
Frames are very, very bad for SEO. Avoid using them unless really necessary.
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.
Bans in robots.txt:
If indexing of a considerable portion of the site is banned, this is likely to affect the nonbanned part as well because spiders will come less frequently to a ?noindex? site.