Keywords | |||
|---|---|---|---|
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 the keyword must be near the beginning. | +3 |
2 | Keywords in URL | 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 |
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. | +3 |
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. | +3 |
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. | +3 |
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. | +2 |
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. | +2 |
8 | Keywords in metatags | 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. | +1 |
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. Keyword proximity is applicable for keyword phrases that consist of 2 or more words. | +1 |
10 | 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. | +1 |
11 | 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. | +1 |
12 | Keyword stemming | 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. | +1 |
13 | Synonyms | 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. | +1 |
14 | Keyword Mistypes | 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. | 0 |
15 | 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. | -2 |
16 | Keyword stuffing | Any artificially inflated keyword density (10% and over) is keyword stuffing and you risk getting banned from search engines. | -3 |
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. | +3 |
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. | +3 |
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. | +3 |
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. | +3 |
21 | Number of backlinks | 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. | +3 |
22 | Anchor text of internal links | This also matters, though not as much as the anchor text of inbound links. | +2 |
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. | +2 |
24 | Age of inbound links | The older, the better. Getting many new links in a short time suggests buying them. | +2 |
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 PR0 directories is useless and it can even be regarded as link spamming, if you have hundreds or thousands of such links. | +2 |
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. | +1 |
27 | 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. | +1 |
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. | +1 |
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. | 0 |
30 | Many outgoing links | Google does not like pages 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. | -1 |
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. | -1 |
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. | -3 |
33 | 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. | -3 |
34 | 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. | -3 |
Metatags | |||
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. | +1 |
36 | <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. | +1 |
37 | <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. | +1 |
38 | <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. | -1 |
Content | |||
39 | 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. | +3 |
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. | +3 |
41 | Keywords font size | 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. | +2 |
42 | Keywords formatting | 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. | +2 |
43 | Age of document | Recent documents (or at least regularly updated ones) are favored. | +2 |
44 | 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. | +1 |
45 | Content separation | 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. | -2 |
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. | -2 |
47 | Illegal Content | Using other people's copyrighted content without their permission or using content that promotes legal violations can get you kicked out of search engines. | -3 |
48 | 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. | -3 |
49 | 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. | -3 |
50 | 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. | -3 |
51 | 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. | -3 |
Visual Extras and SEO | |||
52 | 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. | 0 |
53 | 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. | 0 |
54 | 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. | 0 |
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. | -1 |
56 | Frames | Frames are very, very bad for SEO. Avoid using them unless really necessary. | -2 |
57 | 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. | -2 |
58 | 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. | -3 |
Domains, URLs, Web Mastery | |||
59 | A very important factor, especially for Yahoo! and Bing. | +3 | |
60 | 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 |
61 | 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. | +2 |
62 | 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. | +2 |
63 | 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. | +2 |
64 | 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. | +2 |
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. | +1 |
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. | +1 |
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. | +1 |
68 | 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. | +1 |
69 | URL length | Generally doesn't matter but if it is a very long URL-s, this starts to look spammy, so avoid having more than 10 words in the URL (3 or 4 for the domain name itself and 6 or 7 for the rest of address is acceptable). | 0 |
70 | IP address | 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. | 0 |
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. | 0 |
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. | 0 |
73 | Hosting downtime | 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. | -1 |
74 | Dynamic URLs | Spiders prefer static URLs, though you will see many dynamic pages on top positions. Long dynamic URLs (over 100 characters) are really bad and in any case you'd better use a tool to rewrite dynamic URLs in something more human- and SEO-friendly. | -1 |
75 | Session IDs | This is even worse than dynamic URLs. Don't use session IDs for information that you'd like to be indexed by spiders. | -2 |
76 | 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. | -2 |
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. | -3 |
February 10, 2011
List of Best and Worst practices for designing a high traffic website
Secrets of META TAGS explained
How to Optimize your META tags |
A vital part of making your pages on your website more 'accessible' to the search engines are the META tags. There are a number of different ones. However, for purposes of this introduction, only the META DESCRIPTION and META KEYWORDS will be examined as they are the most important as as as site placing is concerned. |
| META DESCRIPTION |
The META DESCRIPTION tag of this page looks like so: <meta name="DESCRIPTION" content="The text you want goes here."> These are the words that will appear in the text of the listing of most [not all] search engines when you do a search. Use interesting words because this is what your reader will see. Consider the following - which one would you click on if your were looking for a holiday home?
Make the description interesting and relevant. No point in telling your would be visitor you have a sea view when you sell trucks! |
| META KEYWORDS |
This tag look like this: <meta name="KEYWORDS" content="happy holidays tranquil surroundings peaceful accommodation holiday home"> Some rules for META DESCRIPTION tags:
|
| TITLE |
By far the most important tag is the TITLE. This is the heading people will see in the Search Engines and is what will make them click on your link or not. Be sure to make your Title as interesting and eye catching as possible.The format for the TITLE tag is like so: <title>Secrets of META TAGS explained.</title> |
| CUSTOMIZE YOUR META TAGS |
Your meta tags on every page of your website should be different. Sure, this is a lot of work but it is essential. You should spend as much time and effort thinking of what your visitors are likely to be typing into the search box at the search engines as what you spend on designing your pages.We did an experiment on on of our large websites about a year ago. This is what we did:
|
| OTHER META TAGS |
Title The title of the web page is perhaps the most important of all meta tags <title>Laugh until you cry</title> Keywords <meta name="keywords" content="free, webmaster, resources, articles, tools, tutorials, reviews, graphics, scripts, download, CIW, freeware"> Description <meta name="description" content="If you want to laugh till you cry, Click here. This stuff is really funny!"> The page description should be less than 100 words Author The name of the person who authored the page <meta name="author" content="Emory Rowland"> The contact person's e-mail address. Don't put this in unless you want SPAM! <link rev="made" href="nospam@mydomain.com"> Copyright The copyright year and the name <meta name="copyright" content="2002 by Laughter"> Revisit How often to tell the spiders to come back <meta name="revisit-after" content="14 days"> Refresh This field must contain a URL that refers the page to another link in a specified number of seconds <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="120; url=http://www.killer-laughter.com"> Expires The date when the content expires <meta http-equiv="expires" content="Wed, 39 Jan 2004 26:29:02 GMT"> Distribution Global – Used for major entry points Local – Used for local entry points <meta name="distribution" content="global"> Robot Web spiders can be restricted using the following Robot meta tags. Recommend you do not use these but your a robots.txt file instead.: All – Robots may traverse and index the page No Index – Robots may traverse but not index the page No Follow – Robots may index the page but not follow it None – Robots may neither index nor traverse the page <meta name="robots" content="nofollow"> Rating General 14 Years Mature Restricted <meta name="rating" content="14 years"> Character set The most common character set is ISO-8859-1 The following is a rough list of the languages contained in the ISO 8859 series ISO-8859-1 – Western Europe and Americas: Afrikaans, Basque, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Faeroese, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish ISO-8859-2 – Latin-written Slavic and Central European languages ISO-8859-3 – Esperanto, Galician, Maltese, and Turkish ISO-8859-4 – Scandinavia/Baltic ISO-8859-5 – Cyrillic ISO-8859-6 – Arabic ISO-8859-7 – Modern Greek ISO-8859-8 – Hebrew ISO-8859-9 – Western Europe and Americas: Afrikaans, Basque, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Faeroese, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Turkish, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and SwedishUTF-8 - Unicode <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1"> Language Choose a language or add another under Other in Front Page (or whatever you use) <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-us"> Page caching Browsers cache pages by default Select the No-Cache option to stop caching of your page <meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache"> Generator The name of the program used to create your web page <meta name="generator" content="Home brew 1.0.0"> Window Target Useful for preventing page framing <meta http-equiv="window-target" content="_top"> Abstract A brief summary of the description meta tag, under 100 words <meta name="abstract" content="Viewpoints, Tools, and Content for Webmasters"> Comments Comments are not actually meta tags Some search engines have used them instead of meta tags You may also want to add a comment as a self note. <!--bla bla bal Remember to buy bread--> |
WHAT ARE KEYWORDS?
Keywords are those specific words which are searched in a search engine. When you search any information on the web in any order, you open a search engine and write some keyword describing what you are looking for. At the other end, the search engine checks your desired keyword related information in its database and shows the results listing pages according to the words submitted. These words that are used to search anything called keywords or search terms. If you have used some search terms, you will know that even a single keyword shows a broad list of required information. To make your search better, you need to use keyword along with other words or a phrase. This gives more relevant search results. You can get some keyword suggestion from different online tools.
Keywords play an important role to increase traffic in your website. Keywords can be used in your website related to the search engine to offer you targeted traffic to you web pages. Keyword facilitates people who need your information or any product to reach you. For example, keywords are the contact numbers for your business and search engines like Google and Yahoo are like the telephone directory, this telephone directory list your contact and address in shape of keyword.
Now, how you will decide that which keywords the best and relevant to your web pages? This is the most important to use top paying keywords and good keywords related to your website. For this, for a while consider you as a customer who goes to the shoe shop and asks for their required shoe. What type of questions you will ask to demand your required design, size, company and she price? And what words or phrase you will use? These will be your keyword and appropriate use of keyword in a phrase. Now in the same way, use keywords in phrases relevant to your product or web content.
List your keywords and phrases or get some help from adwords keyword tool, keyword selector tool or another keyword tool and also use keywords analyzer to find top paying keywords related to your website. Now use your keywords in your web content in an appropriate phrase and wait for the result. Remember, that a single popular keyword have a lot of competition to get top ranking in the search result.
Do not expect that after using proper keywords and submitting your site to the search engines ensures the flood of traffic to your website. Seo is not a part time job, it require time and concentration as well as seo skill. Firstly, search engines can take several weak to process your submission. Secondly, some search engine considers many other factors such as site popularity and traffic to rank your site. Site popularity is determined by the back links to your site. Therefore, it is necessary to enhance your site popularity; you need to establish reciprocal links techniques.
Another important factor that most people forget while putting keyword position, the people may not enter the keyword or phrase in search engine as your keyword. So using keywords according to their nature is very necessary.
It is advised you use some keyword search tool or google keyword tool to find some good adwords keywords, ppc keywords and adsense keywords relevant to your pages. Don’t forget that your purpose is to get targeted traffic therefore, the more accurate and appropriate keywords, the more chances your site will be reviewed.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
can help you get some good keyword according to your site.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
can help you get some good keyword according to your site.
Let me tell you guys that how I use my keywords:
The best places of keywords in your pages include at the top of your page, in the headline, sub headline, in title, first and
last paragraph. Search engine spiders are to as wise as you, they search for the exact keyword. Therefore if you really
interested to boost up your traffic, then use specific keywords in the exact phrase. Try to use the keyword in the first
paragraph, in the first line or sentence.
Using keywords in META tags always a good technique to enhance the site and keyword traffic. It doesn’t matter which tool
you are using to design your pages, after you have finished your design, save your work and open the HTML coding. Check
the HTML coding,
Title: The sites title something that you show at the top of the browser screen in blue button. You can change the site title
with very shot description and include one keyword.
Description: Now do something same like title for the keyword and description. For keyword type some appropriate keyword
and for site description, write a short sentence, this will be shown in browser when visitor will search your site and the search
list will appear on the browser screen. You can write this description at least 25 words and include one or two keywords.
It is better to use different site title and description and keyword for each page.
If you add an image or picture, you can include an ALT tag containing a short description with a keyword. The search engine
robot will read your ALT tag like META tag.
Try to find a domain name containing keyword such as seotips or seo_tips. This will get you additional fairy points same like
including keywords in your page names.
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