Services: SEO Search Engine Optimization

Keywords in your website title.

A search engine optimization must! This is the most important place to use keywords because what is written inside the tag shows in search results as your page title. The title tag must be 12 words at most and the the keyword should be near the beginning. Also don’t stuff try to make some sense and use 4 commas or symbols at most. Remember symbols count as a word commas do not (density).

Keywords in websites URL

Keywords in URLs help a lot on most search engines. Using http://domainname.com/seo.html, where “SEO” is the keyword phrase will help you rank in most cases. Run scans first to see or do a simple google search to see what other sites are doing.

Keyword density in document text

Another very important factor you need to check. 4-8 % for major keywords is best, 1-3 for minor. Keyword density of over 9% is too high and looks more like keyword stuffing to SE’s, than your naturally written text.

Anchor Text

Very important, especially for the anchor text of inbound links, because if you have the keyword in the anchor text in a link from another site, this is regarded as getting a vote from this site. You want these to look natural as well and come from content related sites with good reputation (age).

Keywords in headings
h1 and h2 Tags

One more place where keywords count a lot. But beware that your page has actual text about the particular keyword. Be careful your content talks about H1′s or you could be penalized.

Keywords in the beginning of a document

Also counts, though not as much as anchor text, title tag or headings. However, have in mind that the beginning of a document does not necessarily mean the first paragraph – for instance if you use tables, the first paragraph of text might be in the second half of the table.

Keywords in tags

I think this is very important! Spiders don’t read images but they do read their textual descriptions in the tags. Don’t over do it but name pics accordingly with top keywords. (first five images w/ low density).

Meta Tags / Keys

Not so important these days, especially for Google. Yahoo! and Bing still use them. Using these tags properly will not hurt, so you should do it.

Keyword Location

Keyword proximity measures how close in the text the search terms are. It is best if they are immediately one after the other (e.g. “seo services”), with no other words between them. For instance, if you have “seo” in the first paragraph and “services” in the third paragraph, this also counts but not as much as having the search phrase “seo services” without any other words in between. Keyword location is applicable for keyword phrases that consist of 2 or more words.

Keywords / Terms

In addition to keywords, you can optimize for keyword phrases that consist of several words – e.g. “SEO Company”. It is best when the keyword phrases you optimize for are popular ones, so you can get a lot of exact matches of the search string but sometimes it makes sense to optimize for 2 or 3 separate keywords (“SEO” and “company”) than for one phrase that might occasionally get an exact match.

Synonyms

Optimizing for synonyms of the target keywords, in addition to the main keywords. This is good for sites in English, for which search engines are smart enough to use synonyms.

Keyword Mistypes

Spelling errors are very frequent and if you know that your target keywords have popular misspellings or alternative spellings.

Stuffing

Any artificially inflated keyword density (10% and over) is keyword stuffing and you risk getting banned from search engines.

Anchor text of inbound links

Link building is one of the most important factors for good rankings, most likely #1. It is best if you have a keyword in the anchor text of your back-links, but even if you don’t have keywords in your backlins text, it will still help your website.

Origin of inbound links

Besides the anchor text, it is important if the site that links to you is a reputable one or not. Generally sites with greater Google PR are considered reputable.

Links from similar sites

Having links from similar sites is very, similar content or subject is very useful. It indicates that the competition is voting for you and you are popular within your topical community.

Links from .Edu and .Gov sites

Priceless! These links are precious because .edu and .gov sites are more reputable than .com. .net, .info, etc. domains, these links are very hard to obtain.

Number of back-links

The more, the better. The reputation of the sites that link to you is more important than their number. It is also important is their anchor text, is there a keyword in it, how old are they.

Anchor text of internal links

This also matters, though not as much as the anchor text of inbound links. Mix it up and use all your terms. Make sense with what you link to, it makes a difference.

Text around your anchor text

The text that is immediately before and after the anchor text also matters because it further indicates the relevance of the link – i.e. if the link is artificial or it naturally flows in the text.

Age back links

The older the back links, the better. Getting many new links in a short time suggests buying them.

Description Meta Tag

Use the meta tag to write the description of your site. MetaTags still work on MSN and Yahoo!, the metatag has one more advantage – it sometimes pops in the description of your web site in the natural search results.

Keywords meta-tag

The tag also matters, though as all meta tags it gets almost no attention from Google and some attention from MSN and Yahoo! The metatag should 10 to 20 keywords long at most. Don’t stuff the meta tag with keywords that you don’t have on the page (bad for rankings).

Content

Having more content (relevant content, which is different from the content on other sites both in wording and topics) is a real boost for your site’s rankings. Frequency of content change is favored by search engines. It is great when you constantly add new content but it is not so great when you only make small updates to existing content. Recent documents (or at least regularly updated ones) are favored.

Generally long pages are not favored, or at least you can achieve better rankings if you have 3 short rather than 1 long page on a given topic, so split long pages into multiple smaller ones.

Coding and Web design

Search engines do not want poorly designed and coded sites. Make sure your code is light, web design is clean and website is content driven. A poor code and web design can harm you a lot.

Invisible text

This is considered black hat SEO and when spiders discover that you have hidden text specially for them they will asses a penalty to your website.

Cloaking

Cloaking is another illegal technique, which partially involves content separation because spiders see one page (highly-optimized, of course), and everybody else is presented with another version of the same page.

Doorway pages

Creating pages that aim to trick search engine spiders that your site is relevant to a site that it is not. This is another way to get a penalty or kicked out of search engines.

Duplicate content

*When you have the same content on several pages, from your site the duplicate content penalty kicks in. Duplicate content applies to pages that reside on other sites but in most cases you are not banned -30 spots on Google (from my experience).

JavaScript

JavaScript code is a mess and spiders can’t follow it, this will definitely hurt your ratings.

Images in text

Having a text only site is no good, but having many images and no text is a SEO no no. Always provide in the tag a meaningful description of an image to help rankings.

Frames

Never use these! Frames are very, very bad for website optimization. Avoid using them unless really necessary.

Flash

Spiders don’t index the content of Flash movies, so avoid using at all cost and don’t forget to give it an alternative textual description if you do use flash.

Using A Flash home page

Never, Never do this!!!! Having a Flash home page (and sometimes whole sections of your site) and no HTML version, is the fastest way to ruin a sites chance to rank well.

Site Accessibility

Another fundamental issue, which that is often neglected. If the site is inaccessible because of broken links, 404 errors, password protected areas, then the site can’t be properly indexed.

Xml ROR – Site-map

It is great to have a complete and recent site map, search engine spiders eat it up, no matter if it is XML, ROR or an HTML site map. I prefer XML or to use xml-sitemaps tool.

Site size

Big is good! Search engines love large sites! However, Just keep links tight and navigation user friendly. Everything 3 clicks from home page at most is a good rule for very large websites.

Web Site age

The older the better but 2 years minimum is needed to do well. Established sites are considered more trustworthy they have been around a while and the new site that just popped up and might disappear.

Website theme

Very important in my opinion. It is not only keywords in URLs and on page that matter (titles / content site-wide). The site theme is even more important for good ranking because when the site fits into one theme, this boosts the rankings of all its pages that are related to this theme.

Top-level domains (TLDs)

Not all Top Level Domains are equal. There are TLDs that are better than others. For instance, the most popular TLD – .com – is much better than .net, .name, .biz, or .info domains.

URL length

Keep it short and try to use keywords. There is a trade off but the max character is 25 and three words. That would be pushing it in my opinion.

Dynamic URLs

SE Spiders prefer static URLs. Long dynamic URLs that are over 100 characters are really bad and in any case you’d better use a tool to rewrite dynamic URLs in something more SEO-friendly.

Redirects 301

When applied properly, redirects can save you. Make sure you use 301′s if permanently moved and 302 if temporary. If done wrong a redirect can be regarded as a black hat technique so be careful.

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