Caleb Love's List: SEO

• The first concept to consider in writing content for search engines is to make the content available to search engines within the first 100 lines of code.
• each page of content should have a clear and unique theme.

• Each web page should have several ingredients in place including:

    
   
  • Clear title tags with a distinct theme such as “orthodontic dental supplies.”
   
  • H1 and H2 tags which support the main theme of this page.
   
  • Keyword density of the main theme of the page in the 5% range.
   
  • Hyperlinks from the main theme of the page to other relevant pages.
   
  • A human readable URL containing the main keywords from this page.
• • Broaden your footprint on the web by writing relevant content in other places, e.g., guest blog posts (such as this), guest articles, white papers, press releases, etc.
   
  • Write compelling content that others will link to such as industry-wide news, “best of” lists and generally any thought leadership or thought provoking content.
   
  • Blog about your industry. Find non-marketing staff to write interesting blog content and write often. The more bloggers who write in your company the better.
   
  • Respond to relevant blog posts with intelligent comments. Some blogs permit you to link back to your website.
   
  • Recruit staff to use Twitter. Have them post links to good content. Some of the content can be yours but not all of it. Promote other’s relevant content, not just your own content.
• • Link out to other relevant content. Show the search engines you care enough to share other good, relevant content by linking out to it.
   
  •  Upload PowerPoint presentations to Slideshare.net. Link it to your website.
   
  • Link from your LinkedIn profile using keywords, not your company name.
   
  •  Create videos and optimize them for search engines. Video is great content for search engines to index.
   
  • Create still photos and upload them to social websites with links back to your website.
   
  • Create a new section in your website with the sole purpose of populating it with a lot of content. The purpose of this content is for search engines. This section doesn’t need to be in your menu navigation structure as long as there is a legitimate link from a footer or header and it’s located in the sitemap. Populate this section with unique pages of content of not less than 250 words each.
   
  • Make sure you have a sitemap (for humans) and an XML sitemap (for search engines).
• Write web page content in a flow according to how your website visitors will consume it efficiently. Write web pages with not more than about 500 words.
• The opposite of this approach is writing a long page of content with a call to action at the end. This is a common mistake.

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• Once you've chosen (or developed) a crawling tool, you need to configure it to behave like your favorite search engine crawler (e.g., Googlebot, Bingbot, etc.). First, you should set the crawler's user agent to an appropriate string.

   
    Popular Search Engine User Agents: 
   
  •   Googlebot - "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
   
  •   Bingbot - "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)"

• Before we can diagnose problems with the site, we have to know exactly what we're dealing with. Therefore, the first (and most important) preparation step is to crawl the entire website.

   

    Crawling Tools

   

    I've written custom crawling and analysis code for my audits, but if you want to avoid coding, I recommend using Screaming Frog's SEO Spider to perform the site crawl (it's free for the first 500 URIs and £99/year after that).

   

    Alternatively, if you want a truly free tool, you can use Xenu's Link Sleuth; however, be forewarned that this tool was designed to crawl a site to find broken links. It displays a site's page titles and meta descriptions, but it was not created to perform the level of analysis we're going to discuss.

   

    For more information about these crawling tools, read Dr. Pete's Crawler Face-off: Xenu vs. Screaming Frog.

• Generally, keyword density in the title, the headings, and the first paragraphs matters more. Needless to say that you should be especially careful not to stuff these areas. Try the Keyword Density Cloud tool to check if your keyword density is in the acceptable limits, especially in the above-mentioned places. If you have a high density percentage for a frequently used keyword, then consider replacing some of the occurrences of the keyword with synonyms. Also, generally words that are in bold and/or italic are considered important by search engines but if any occurrence of the target keywords is in bold and italic, this also looks unnatural and in the best case it will not push your page up.

• Another common keyword scam is doorway pages. Before Google introduced the PageRank algorithm, doorways were a common practice and there were times when they were not considered an illegal optimization. A doorway page is a page that is made especially for the search engines and that has no meaning for humans but is used to get high positions in search engines and to trick users to come to the site. Although keywords are still very important, today keywords alone have less effect in determining the position of a site in search results, so doorway pages do not get so much traffic to a site but if you use them, don't ask why Google punished you.  

   

• Very similar to doorway pages was a scam called hidden text. This is text, which is invisible to humans (e.g. the text color is the same as the page background) but is included in the HTML source of the page, trying to fool search engines that the particular page is keyword-rich. Needless to say, both doorway pages and hidden text can hardly be qualified as optimization techniques, there are more manipulation than everything else.  

   

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  It is a basic SEO rule that content is king. But not duplicate content. In terms of Google, duplicate content means text that is the same as the text on a different page on the SAME site (or on a sister-site, or on a site that is heavily linked to the site in question and it can be presumed that the two sites are related) – i.e. when you copy and paste the same paragraphs from one page on your site to another, then you might expect to see your site's rank drop.
• Most SEO experts believe that syndicated content is not treated as duplicate content and there are many examples of this. If syndicated content were duplicate content, that the sites of news agencies would have been the first to drop out of search results. Still, it does not hurt to check from time if your site has duplicate content with another, at least because somebody might be illegally copying your content and you do not know.  <!-- The guys from <a rel="nofollow" href=http://www.inetseo.co.uk target=_blank>iNET SEO</a> have told me about cases like this,  so as incredible as it might seen, content theft is not that uncommon.  --> The Similar Page Checker tool will help you see if you have grounds to worry about duplicate content.
• You can use the Domain Stats Tool to see the number of backlinks (inbound links) to your site and the Site Link Analyzer to see how many outbound links you have.
• Using keywords in links (the anchor text), domain names, folder and file names does boost your search engine rankings but again, the precise measure is the boundary between topping the search results and being kicked out of them.

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• A lot of developers are trying to impress their visitor by implementing massive Ajax features (particularly for navigation purposes), but did you know that it is a big SEO mistake? Because Ajax content is loaded dynamically, so it is not spiderable or indexable by search engines.
• Another disadvantage of Ajax — since the address URL doesn't reload, your visitor can not send the current page to their friends.
• Don’t use the EXACT same anchor text everywhere on your website. This can sometimes be seen as search engine spam too.
• the title tag of the default WordPress theme isn’t   that useful: Site Name > Blog Archive > Post Title. Why isn’t this search engine friendly? Because every single blog post will have the same text "Site Name > Blog Archive >" at the beginning of the title tag. If you really want to include the site name in the title tag, it   should be at the end: Post Title | Site Name.

• Many bloggers write very long post titles. So what? In search engine result pages, your title tag is used as the link heading. You have about 65 characters (including  spaces) to get your message across or risk it getting cutoff.

   

• You want to make sure your keywords are included in the crucial areas:

   
   
  • the Title Tag
   
  • the Page URL (friendly URL)
   
  • the Main Heading (H1 or H2)
   
  • the first paragraph of content.
   
  • at least 3 times in the body content (more or less depending on amount of content and if and only if it makes sense).
   
   

• Most people aim for a keyword density of 2% (i.e. use the keyword 2 times for every 100 words). But what if your keyword phrase is “SEO for Web Designers and Web Developers” how many times can you repeat that before it sounds just plain unnatural? Write for your readers not for search engines. If you follow the tips   in this article you’ll be writing naturally for your readers; which works for the search engines too.

   

  Warning: Do not over fill your page with the same keywords or you might be penalized by search engines for keyword stuffing.

   
• There should be a page (like a sitemap or  blog archives) that links to all the pages on your site.
• To search engines, a www and a non-www URL are considered two different URLs. You should always keep your domain and URL structure consistent. If you start promoting your site without the "www", stick with it.

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