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. |
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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 |
+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 |
+3 |
5 |
Keywords in headings (<H1>, <H2>, etc. tags) |
One more place where keywords count a lot. But beware that |
+3 |
6 |
Keywords in the beginning of a document |
Also counts, though not as much as anchor text, title tag or |
+2 |
7 |
Keywords in <alt> tags |
Spiders don’t read images but they do read their textual description 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, fillthese tags properly. In any case, filling these tags properly will not hurt, so do it. |
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9 |
Keyword proximity |
Keyword proximity measures how close in the text the keywords |
+1 |
10 |
Keyword phrases |
In addition to keywords, you can optimize for keyword phrases |
+1 |
11 |
Secondary keywords |
Optimizing for secondary keywords can be a golden mine because |
+1 |
12 |
Keyword stemming |
For English this is not so much of a factor because words that |
+1 |
13 |
Synonyms |
Optimizing for synonyms of the target keywords, in addition to |
+1 |
14 |
Keyword Mistypes |
Spelling errors are very frequent and if you know that your |
0 |
15 |
Keyword dilution |
When you are optimizing for an excessive amount of keywords, |
-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 |
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18 |
Origin of inbound links |
Besides the anchor text, it is important if the site that |
+3 |
19 |
Links from similar sites |
Generally the more, the better. But the reputation of the |
+3 |
20 |
Links from .edu and .gov sites |
These links are precious because .edu and .gov sites are more |
+3 |
21 |
Number of backlinks |
Generally the more, the better. But the reputation of the |
+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 |
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24 |
Age of inbound links |
The older, the better. Getting many new links in a short time |
+2 |
25 |
Links from directories |
Could work, though it strongly depends on which directories. |
+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 |
+1 |
27 |
Named anchors |
Named anchors (the target place of internal links) are useful |
+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 |
Presumably, this does not affect you, provided the links are |
0 |
30 |
Many outgoing links |
Google does not like pages that consists mainly of links, so |
-1 |
31 |
Excessive linking, link spamming |
It is bad for your rankings, when you have many links to/from |
-1 |
32 |
Outbound links to link farms and other suspicious sites |
Unlike inbound links from link farms and other suspicious |
-3 |
33 |
Cross-linking |
Cross-linking occurs when site A links to site B, site B links |
-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 |
+1 |
36 |
<Keywords> metatag |
The <Keywords> metatag also matters, though as all |
+1 |
37 |
<Language> metatag |
If your site is language-specific, don’t leave this tag empty. |
+1 |
38 |
<Refresh> metatag |
The <Refresh> metatag is one way to redirect visitors |
-1 |
Content | |||
39 |
Unique content |
Having more content (relevant content, which is different from |
+3 |
40 |
Frequency of content change |
Frequent changes are favored. It is great when you constantly |
+3 |
41 |
Keywords font size |
When a keyword in the document text is in a larger font size |
+2 |
42 |
Keywords formatting |
Bold and italic are another way to emphasize important words |
+2 |
43 |
Age of document |
Recent documents (or at least regularly updated ones) are favored. |
+2 |
44 |
File size |
Generally long pages (i.e. 1,500-2,000 words or more) are not |
+1 |
45 |
Content separation |
From a marketing point of view content separation (based on |
-2 |
46 |
Poor coding and design |
Search engines say that they do not want poorly designed and |
-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 |
-3 |
49 |
Cloaking |
Cloaking is another illegal technique, which partially |
-3 |
50 |
Doorway pages |
Creating pages that aim to trick spiders that your site is a |
-3 |
51 |
Duplicate content |
When you have the same content on several pages on the site, |
-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 |
0 |
54 |
Podcasts and videos |
Podcasts and videos are becoming more and more popular but as |
0 |
55 |
Images instead of text links |
Using images instead of text links is bad, especially when you |
-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 |
-2 |
58 |
A Flash home page |
Fortunately this epidemic disease seems to have come to an |
-3 |
Domains, URLs, Web Mastery | |||
59 |
Keyword-rich |
A very important factor, especially for Yahoo! and Bing. |
+3 |
60 |
Site Accessibility |
Another fundamental issue, which that is often neglected. If |
+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, |
+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 |
+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 |
+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 |
0 |
71 |
Adsense will boost your ranking |
Adsense is not related in any way to SEO ranking. Google will |
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 |
-1 |
75 |
Session IDs |
This is even worse than dynamic URLs. Don’t use session IDs |
-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 |
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