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I have found the below check list on some canadian site specialized in SEO. Just follow the steps described below. It is a good start. Then in the process you will discover new tips to add to this list and to make your SEO more successful.
1. Domain & File Names:
Choose your site domain name that contains words from your primary keyword phrase. Your domain name should also be easy to spell and easy to remember. You keyword phrase also should in many cases go in your file name. Read this thread Keywords in the URL from SEO Chat Forum.
For example I use the file name seo-techniques.html for this page.
2. Keyword Phrases:
a. Use keywords that are being searched for. You can check your keyword phrases with either the Search Term Suggestion Tool or the Overture Keyword Popularity Tool to find out how often they are being searched. You can also look at Google AdWords Keyword Suggestions for suggestions for different keyword phrases.
b. Add keyword synonyms to your content.
c. Put the keyword phrases in the <title>keyword phrase</title> .
d. Insert the keyword phrases in a <h1>keyword phrase</h1> tag at the beginning of your page. Keyword synonyms should be put in your h2 & h3 tags. The h1, h2, h3 tags are used for titles and subtitles in articles.
e. Make sure you use your keyword phrases from the page you are linking to, in your anchor text on the site map. i.e. SEO Techniques.
3. Keyword Density:
Keyword density is a very important part of search engine optimization. Keyword density is the percent that your keyword or keyword phrase are of your web page text. You may want to look that your competition to see what keyword density they are using. To high a keyword density will be considered search engine spam and can get you blacklisted.
Your keywords should be toward the top of your page and your keyword phrase be in either every paragraph or every second paragraph depending on your paragraph length.
4. Bad Techniques:
Bad search engine optimization techniques can get you blacklisted from a search engine. Some techniques that are considered spam are cloaking, invisible text, tiny text, identical pages, doorway pages, refresh tags, link farms, filling comment tags with keyword phrases only, keyword phrases in the author tag, keyword density to high, mirror pages and mirror sites.
While these techniques might work to give you a higher ranking for short time in the long run they will hurt you.
Google has a good article on Google information for webmasters that is very imformative if you are considering Getting a SEO Company to so work on your website.
5. Title & Meta Description Tag:
Construction of your title tag is one of the most important things you need to do. Each page should have a different title with 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning. When search engine results are displayed the title is the first thing people see.
Below the title is a description which will be either be taken from your meta name description content="Description phrase" or from the first sentence on at page. You description should also have 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning as so should your first sentence. You should have a different title, description and first sentence on each page. You many also what to try shorter titles with only one keyword or keyword phrase as this will raise you keyword relevance. Also you can consider putting your domain name at the very end of the title.
6. Meta Keywords Tag:
The meta keywords tag is not as relevant as it used to be and some say Google doesn't ever look at it anymore, but put it in anyway. It is as follows, <meta name="keywords" content="keywords,go,here" /> and put in it all your keywords and keyword phrases. This tag should be different for each page.
7. Author & Robots Tags:
The Author Tag should contain the name of the company that owns the site. This tag will help you get a #1 position for your company's name.
<meta name="author" content="Solutions with Service" />
Use a generic Robots Tag on all pages that you want indexed. This instructs the robots to crawl the page. The following is the generic robots tag.
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />
8. Quality Content:
Quality content will bring people back and as people always want to tell others about a good thing it will get you forward links from other sites. Your content should be written with your keyword phrases in mind
9. Quantity Content:
The more the better. Just remember your content will need to be both quantity and quality.
10. Changing Content:
You can do this by hand or with a script. For example you can have a php script that draws five paragraphs from a pool of twenty paragraphs when the content is different each time the php page is accessed.
http://www.carsinlondon.com/used-ca...don-ontario.php shows a sample of php script that will do this.
11. Avoid Dynamic URLs:
Are you pages via php, asp, or cf? Some search engines may have a problem indexing them. Create static pages whenever possible. Avoid symbols in your URLs like the "?" that you will often find in php, asp or cf pages.
Static pages are the best but if you have a db driven site, make sure the menu and site map like go to inventory.cfm not inventory.cfm?vn=0 .
12. Frames:
Many search engines can't follow frame links. Make sure you provide an alternative method for the search engines to enter and index your site. For more information read Search Engines and Frames.
13. Site Map:
A good menu system is really a site map. A well constructed menu system that is on each page and contains a link to very page on the website is all you need.
14. Site Themes:
All of the top 3 search engines look for site themes or a common topic when they crawl a website. If your site is about one specific topic you will rank better than if you have more than one theme or topic on your site. By using similar keyword phrases in each page the search engines will detect a theme this will be to your advantage.
15. Site Design:
You may think, what does site design have to with search engine optimization. Well if your website has a bad color scheme that is hard to read, is not organized, is a cheesy looking site, then all your site optimization has been a waste of time. Make your site attractive to the viewer, make things easy to find, have you graphic header and menu bar the same place on each page.
These things will keep your visitors on the site and bring them back. A well optimized site with a high search engine results position that is ugly and is hard find information on, will not keep the visitors your optimization has brought to the site.
Use W3C Link Checker to make sure all your page links are good. If you have broken links on your site this can effect the ranking you are given.
Put a proper doctype on each page. If you don't have a proper doctype on each page Internet Exployer will go into quirks mode and display it different.
Use The W3C Markup Validate Service to verify that your pages are Validate HTML or XHTML code. The W3C validation will verify that your HTML or XHTML is not broken. This validation show you any broken code that could cause your webpages from displaying properly in all the different browsers and browser versions.
16. Separate Content & Presentation:
Put all your presentation code into Cascading Styles Sheets (CSS). This separates the presentation from the content and makes your html files up to 50% smaller. It is reported that the search engine bots prefer this and the more content you have compared to presentation in your file, the better you get rated. Read why tables for markup are stupid for an overview.
17. Robots.txt File:
While this file is not really required it should be included so that the search engine bots don't get 404 errors when they look for it. Just include the following 2 lines and drop it in the root.
User-agent: *
Disallow:
1. Domain & File Names:
Choose your site domain name that contains words from your primary keyword phrase. Your domain name should also be easy to spell and easy to remember. You keyword phrase also should in many cases go in your file name. Read this thread Keywords in the URL from SEO Chat Forum.
For example I use the file name seo-techniques.html for this page.
2. Keyword Phrases:
a. Use keywords that are being searched for. You can check your keyword phrases with either the Search Term Suggestion Tool or the Overture Keyword Popularity Tool to find out how often they are being searched. You can also look at Google AdWords Keyword Suggestions for suggestions for different keyword phrases.
b. Add keyword synonyms to your content.
c. Put the keyword phrases in the <title>keyword phrase</title> .
d. Insert the keyword phrases in a <h1>keyword phrase</h1> tag at the beginning of your page. Keyword synonyms should be put in your h2 & h3 tags. The h1, h2, h3 tags are used for titles and subtitles in articles.
e. Make sure you use your keyword phrases from the page you are linking to, in your anchor text on the site map. i.e. SEO Techniques.
3. Keyword Density:
Keyword density is a very important part of search engine optimization. Keyword density is the percent that your keyword or keyword phrase are of your web page text. You may want to look that your competition to see what keyword density they are using. To high a keyword density will be considered search engine spam and can get you blacklisted.
Your keywords should be toward the top of your page and your keyword phrase be in either every paragraph or every second paragraph depending on your paragraph length.
4. Bad Techniques:
Bad search engine optimization techniques can get you blacklisted from a search engine. Some techniques that are considered spam are cloaking, invisible text, tiny text, identical pages, doorway pages, refresh tags, link farms, filling comment tags with keyword phrases only, keyword phrases in the author tag, keyword density to high, mirror pages and mirror sites.
While these techniques might work to give you a higher ranking for short time in the long run they will hurt you.
Google has a good article on Google information for webmasters that is very imformative if you are considering Getting a SEO Company to so work on your website.
5. Title & Meta Description Tag:
Construction of your title tag is one of the most important things you need to do. Each page should have a different title with 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning. When search engine results are displayed the title is the first thing people see.
Below the title is a description which will be either be taken from your meta name description content="Description phrase" or from the first sentence on at page. You description should also have 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning as so should your first sentence. You should have a different title, description and first sentence on each page. You many also what to try shorter titles with only one keyword or keyword phrase as this will raise you keyword relevance. Also you can consider putting your domain name at the very end of the title.
6. Meta Keywords Tag:
The meta keywords tag is not as relevant as it used to be and some say Google doesn't ever look at it anymore, but put it in anyway. It is as follows, <meta name="keywords" content="keywords,go,here" /> and put in it all your keywords and keyword phrases. This tag should be different for each page.
7. Author & Robots Tags:
The Author Tag should contain the name of the company that owns the site. This tag will help you get a #1 position for your company's name.
<meta name="author" content="Solutions with Service" />
Use a generic Robots Tag on all pages that you want indexed. This instructs the robots to crawl the page. The following is the generic robots tag.
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />
8. Quality Content:
Quality content will bring people back and as people always want to tell others about a good thing it will get you forward links from other sites. Your content should be written with your keyword phrases in mind
9. Quantity Content:
The more the better. Just remember your content will need to be both quantity and quality.
10. Changing Content:
You can do this by hand or with a script. For example you can have a php script that draws five paragraphs from a pool of twenty paragraphs when the content is different each time the php page is accessed.
http://www.carsinlondon.com/used-ca...don-ontario.php shows a sample of php script that will do this.
11. Avoid Dynamic URLs:
Are you pages via php, asp, or cf? Some search engines may have a problem indexing them. Create static pages whenever possible. Avoid symbols in your URLs like the "?" that you will often find in php, asp or cf pages.
Static pages are the best but if you have a db driven site, make sure the menu and site map like go to inventory.cfm not inventory.cfm?vn=0 .
12. Frames:
Many search engines can't follow frame links. Make sure you provide an alternative method for the search engines to enter and index your site. For more information read Search Engines and Frames.
13. Site Map:
A good menu system is really a site map. A well constructed menu system that is on each page and contains a link to very page on the website is all you need.
14. Site Themes:
All of the top 3 search engines look for site themes or a common topic when they crawl a website. If your site is about one specific topic you will rank better than if you have more than one theme or topic on your site. By using similar keyword phrases in each page the search engines will detect a theme this will be to your advantage.
15. Site Design:
You may think, what does site design have to with search engine optimization. Well if your website has a bad color scheme that is hard to read, is not organized, is a cheesy looking site, then all your site optimization has been a waste of time. Make your site attractive to the viewer, make things easy to find, have you graphic header and menu bar the same place on each page.
These things will keep your visitors on the site and bring them back. A well optimized site with a high search engine results position that is ugly and is hard find information on, will not keep the visitors your optimization has brought to the site.
Use W3C Link Checker to make sure all your page links are good. If you have broken links on your site this can effect the ranking you are given.
Put a proper doctype on each page. If you don't have a proper doctype on each page Internet Exployer will go into quirks mode and display it different.
Use The W3C Markup Validate Service to verify that your pages are Validate HTML or XHTML code. The W3C validation will verify that your HTML or XHTML is not broken. This validation show you any broken code that could cause your webpages from displaying properly in all the different browsers and browser versions.
16. Separate Content & Presentation:
Put all your presentation code into Cascading Styles Sheets (CSS). This separates the presentation from the content and makes your html files up to 50% smaller. It is reported that the search engine bots prefer this and the more content you have compared to presentation in your file, the better you get rated. Read why tables for markup are stupid for an overview.
17. Robots.txt File:
While this file is not really required it should be included so that the search engine bots don't get 404 errors when they look for it. Just include the following 2 lines and drop it in the root.
User-agent: *
Disallow:
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