Sunday, March 8, 2009

Organic SEO Best Practices Checklist

The DOs

Description

TIPs

Title Tag

<title>keyword in the Title</Title>

  • < 60-65 characters including spaces.
  • First 3 words in any combination will lead to keyword phrase.

Image Tag

<img src="" alt="keyword in the alternate text"/>

  • Alt is another opportunity to add keywords
  • Add only image related text in Alt
  • Create short and meaningful alt text

Anchors

<a href="link to a related website">keyword</a>

  • Text based links
  • As long as it is a important keyword text and the link is relevant, anchor it
  • Avoid broken links
  • Use anchor text for linking to relevant dynamic content (crawlers will favor you)

Meta Tags

<meta name="keyword" content="related keyword list"/>

<meta name="description" content="short description of your website with few keywords"/>

  • <200 characters (description)
  • Do not repeat exact title in description
  • Avoid keyword repetition

Header Tags

<h1></h1>,

<h2></h2>,

<h3></h3>,

<h4></h4>

  • Most important <h1>------> less important <h4>
  • <h1> occurrence – 2 at most

URL

Parameter: http://www.yoursite.com/products.jsp?id=12356&category=7&type=42&size=6&batch=65

Depth: http://www.yoursite.com/products/category/batch/season/item

  • Max parameters: 2


  • Max depth: 4

Inbound Links
  • As many strong inbound links, the better
  • Request links, write articles with link to your site, PR, social network community, paid links

Visible Body Text

<body>body text</body>

  • Use <strong></strong> for relevant keywords
  • Use <em></em> for relevant keywords

Sitemap

XML based document at the root of your website.

http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

Learn more about writing Sitemap

  • < 50,000 URLs and 10MB size per site map
  • <1,000 site maps, per website, if multiple site maps used
  • Submit Site to the search engines

Navigation
  • Text based navigation on the left

Domain Name
  • If new website, try using keyword in domain name to specifically define the content of your website

Bread-crumb trail

On your web page, provides navigation depth info.

Home > kids > Toys > 4T – 5T

  • Use your website name instead of HOME

FAQs

FAQs of popular searches related to your product

  • 4-15 questions
  • 200-800 words for each FAQ.

Popular Search List

Maintain a list of popular /most frequently searched items/ keywords related to your product /website on very web page.

  • The search list should be relevant and should link to pages in your website.

Robots.txt

Learn more about robots.txt

  • Suggest crawlers on pages to crawl and pages to avoid
  • Helps in logging search engine visits

Company Address

Company Name, Street Address, City, State, Zip, Country, Phone#

  • Provides visibility in location search

Contact Statement

If you need more info, please contact ……

  • Instead,

    If you need more info about <yourproductname>, please contact …..


The DON'Ts

The Fix

Duplicate URLs

  • Use canonical link tag in the <head> section of all the duplicate pages to point to the original web page content:

    <link rel="canonical" href=http://yourwebsite.com/product.html"/>

Broken Links

  • Fix them!
  • Add nofollow keyword to the link suggesting the search crawler to not visit the link

Cookies

  • Un restrict cookies
  • Set some default content when cookie is unavailable.

Session Ids

  • Generate a guest user and allow to view the un restricted content

Frames

  • Provide alternative to framed web site using the <noframes> tag.
  • The <noframes> tag content should be exactly the same as frames site content
  • Add link to HOME, with attribute TARGET="_top"

302 redirect

  • Avoid, if possible
  • Use robot.txt to avoid crawling this link, if possible
  • Add > 15-sec delay before redirecting
Posted by BhawnaSingh
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