Description
Medium priority positive SEO techniques to help you get higher visibility and page ranking in the most popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and DMOZ.
- Create as much high value content as you can. [Medium Priority]
- Keep your site content focused one general topic or theme. [Medium Priority]
- Keep your pages/links live as long as possible. [Medium Priority]
- Create a sitemap. [Medium Priority]
- Create an XML sitemap or Google sitemap. [Medium Priority]
- Use 301 redirects for permanent redirects. [Medium Priority]
- Use 302 redirects only for long or ugly URLs. [Medium Priority]
- Get as many quality inbound links as you can. [Medium Priority]
- Put your keyword phrase in the first paragraph. [Medium Priority]
- Put your keyword phrase at the top of the HTML. [Medium Priority]
- Put your keyword phrase in alternative text. [Medium Priority]
- Increase the font size of your keyword phrase. [Medium Priority]
- Format your keyword phrases to stand out. [Medium Priority]
- Write a descriptive meta description. [Medium Priority]
- Link to your page from within your site. [Medium Priority]
- Put up links that flow within the text. [Medium Priority]
- Keep asking for inbound links. [Medium Priority]
- Get linked in DMOZ and Yahoo! [Medium Priority]
- Periodically check your outbound links for Google Pagerank. [Medium Priority]
- Link all major images. [Medium Priority]
- Keep your pages up-to-date. [Medium Priority]
- If you must use frames, always use the noframes tag. [Medium Priority]
- Make use of taxonomies to classify and sort your content. [Medium Priority]
- If you must use Flash, always include alternative text. [Medium Priority]
Content is king. The more high value content you have on your site, the more there is to be indexed and appear in search engines. High value content is well researched, notated where necessary and provides value to users.
The theme or topic of your entire site is important as well. If you have a lot of pages all around one basic theme or topic, that will lend more credibility to each page that follows that same theme or topic. Having scattered content on many subjects that are unrelated adds a level of “noise” to your site diluting focus.
Older pages (at the same domain) will generally rank higher than newer ones because they’ve been around longer.
Search engines love sitemaps – not necessarily for ranking, but for finding links on your site. It’s not critical that you create an XML sitemap or Google sitemap, plain HTML sitemaps work just as well.
Search engines love sitemaps – not necessarily for ranking, but for finding links on your site. While it’s not critical that you create an XML sitemap or Google sitemap, it is preferred but plain HTML sitemaps work just as well.
When you redirect your pages, you should always use a 301 http server redirect. This tells the search engines that the redirect is permanent and that they should change their index to use the new URL. Spammers use other types of redirects (HTTP 302 redirects and meta refresh), so they are not a good idea to use.
HTTP 302 redirects are for temporary redirects. The only time you should use them is for redirecting ugly URLs to more user-friendly ones. This tells the search engine that the ugly URL should not be removed from the index, because the user-friendly URL is just to make the URL palatable. Keep in mind that many spammers use 302 redirects to fool search engines. So be judicious in your use of them. A more efficient and safer way to accomplish this is through Apache httpd Rewrite or RedirectMatch directives.
Links are important, especially from sites other than your own. These are called inbound links. And if you get a lot of inbound links, that will help your page ranking. Remember that 1-2 links from high-reputation sites are better than 10 links from link farms.
Repetition of your keyword phrase is important in your content. But it’s especially important in the first one or two paragraphs of text. And if you can repeat it once in the first paragraph that will help up it’s priority.
More than just the first paragraph, you should try to move your content towards the top of the HTML document. And that includes your keyword phrase.
Images are a great place to put your keyword phrase – in the alternate text. This is a way to add your keyword phrase into your document without being repetitive to your readers. But be careful not to overdo it – as you don’t want to appear to be keyword stuffing. That could get your site banned.
Search engines understand that fonts that are larger than the standard font size on the page indicate text that is more important. Use CSS or the font tag. Apply font size changes to headline tags as well.
Use < strong > and < em > where appropriate to make your keyword phrases stand out. Search engines can read those tags, and will recognize that text that is emphasized is often more important than the surrounding text.
Search engines use the description meta tag as the description in their index. So it’s important to describe your pages accurately. This helps customers find your pages, and search engines to index them.
Links are important, and linking from one page to another on your own site is a very easy way to get links. They aren’t as important in search engine ranking as links from external sites, but they do help. If nothing else, they help the search engine spider find all the pages on your site.
Links that make sense within the context of the document (whether from external or your own site) will rank higher than lists of links or other forms of artificial links. This is because search engines value content and links that make sense within the context of the content are more definitely related to that content than links that are inside lists.
The older the links are the better. If you get 100 links added all at once, it appears to the search engines that you are buying link placement, and that can be construed as spamming.
DMOZ and Yahoo! and other directories show that your page is related to the contentin that section of the directory.
Whenever you add an external link on your site, you run the risk that it changes from the site you linked to into a link farm or “bad neighborhood”. By periodically checking the Google PageRank of the external sites you link to, you can remove links that have gotten bad. This will help you make sure that your page’s credibility is not reduced by who you are linking to.
It’s important to always link images because people click on images. And search engines value content that has been linked. The key is to always include alternative text, so that the search engine has text to rank. Any image that your customer can see on the page should be linked.
Pages that are regularly updated are given priority over pages that are older and ignored. But you should do more than simply fix typos or make small changes, regular, extensive updates are more effective than minor updates.
Frames and search engines don’t mix well. But if you must use frames, then you should always include an extensive noframes version of your site. And by extensive, the best way to get your site indexed in search engines is to completely rewrite it in your noframes version.
Making your content easy for your users and search engines increases the chances search engines will find it and index it. Taxonomies are one way to help with this, taxonomies help organise your content into categories or groups of like subjects such as “colors” or “states”.
Flash and search engines don’t mix well, but if you must use flash you should include alternate text that describes exactly what the Flash element includes. And if you use Flash for your entire site, you should always do an alternate version of the complete site in HTML so that search engines and non-Flash browsers can view it as well.