SEO TIPS
- Try and achieve as much as possible from your keywords while keeping the title tag text between under 50 characters.
- If the site has multiple domains or sub-domains with the same content you should point them all to one single domain.
- New domains are sandboxed preventing them for doing too well so register your domains for longer than a year - most spammers usually only buy domains for 1 or 2 years.
- Search engines prefer dashes in domain names instead of underscores
- URLs should be kept as short as possible (ideally under 100 characters)
- Each page should have unique meta tag description and be less than 200 characters. Search engines don't require this character limit but otherwise some characters are not used.
- The meta keywords should be unique on each page, less than 10 words. The main keyword should appear in the main page content.
- You should use the main HTML header tags (H1, H2, H3 etc.) as these help identify the nature of the page increase the position in the search engines for the chosen keywords.
- Your keywords should be in the main page content as near to the top as possible and use the bold tag on keywords where possible.
- All images must have an alt text that describes the image using short relevant text.
- The text within link tags should use keywords instead of "more" or "click here".
- There should be no more than 100 external links per page.
- The size of pages should not exceed 100K if possible but now more people have broadband his is less of an issue.
- Search engines prefer up to date pages, new pages and larger sites so the more you update and evolve your site the better.
- Site consistency - although its not proven to be a factor of SEO, it does help usability.
- Use text instead of images where possible. If you have to use images, use alt text. - Search engines don't read text on images.
- Get listed in directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo, avoid link farms.
- DO NOT copy your content from elsewhere. Not only does this violate copyright laws, search engines may penalise you for this.
- Avoid duplicate copy. If two pages have identical copy search engines will ignore one of the pages.
- Use Flash sparingly. Search engines find it difficult to get relevant text from Flash to it is to be used for Eye Candy only or where additional text based navigation exists.
- Search engines do not follow links in forms, image mapping, javascript or frames so alternative links need to be put in places where any of these are used.
- Adding a sitemap helps search engines spider your site easily
- Do not use gateway or introductory splash pages as they are poor from a usability point of view and mean your content is further away for spiders to find.
Link building
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