Ironvine Search Marketing

32 Most Important SEO Tips
By Edwin Reyes (c) 2008

Following these simple tips will definitely boost your traffic and search engine rankings for free.

1. Make sure your site is not under construction or incomplete with little or no unique content.

2. When your site is ready, submit it to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com. Consider also submittíng to other search engines but most of them are powered by these four leading search engines. Also submít your site to reputable high PR web directories, open directories, yellow pages and social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, furl, etc.

3. Submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com (sitemap for search engines usually in XML format)

4. Offer a sitemap to your site visitors for easy page navigation. (sitemap for visitors in HTML format)

5. Create unique and rich content sites. Avoid duplicate content. Do not create multiple pages, sub-domains, domains, mirror sites or sites with different domain names but the same content.

6. Check your keywords and make sure they are relevant and actually are contained in your site. Avoid keyword stuffing.

7. Use text instead of images in your content, links and important subjects.

8. Make your TITLE and ALT tags descriptive, simple and keyword rich. Avoid irrelevant and repeated keywords.

9. Your Title tag should be 60-80 characters maximum length.

10. Your Meta tag description should be 160-180 characters, including spaces. (about 25-30 words)

11. The keywords Meta Tag must be 15-20 words maximum.

12. Optimize pages with Headings (H1, H2, H3..) containing your site’s primary keywords.

13. Validate your CSS and HTML. Check for errors and broken links.

14. If your site contains dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), make sure you use SEO friendly URLs. Search engine spiders have difficulty indexing dynamic pages.

15. Maximum links per page must be fewer than 100. Avoid the risk of being flagged as a link farm by search engines.

16. Use Lynx as text browser to check your site.

17. Allow search bots (good ones) to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site.

18. Check your web server/host if it supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. It tells search engines whether your content has changed since your site was last crawled. It will save you bandwidth, resources and avoid server overload.

19. Use a Robots.txt file to manage and control search engine spiders that index your site. You can allow and disallow spiders and choose directories you want to be crawled and indexed. With bad bots or spam bots you need to modify your HTACCESS file to properly and effectively manage bots or spiders. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn more about the Robots.txt file.

20. Do not attempt to present different content to search engines than what you show to your site visitors.

21. Avoid dirty tricks and exploiting loop holes to improve search engine ranking.

22. Avoid links to bad neighborhoods such as web spammer, link farm, phishing, hacker, crack, gambling, pörn and scam sites. Linking to them will greatly affect your search engine rankings.

23. Do not attempt to join in link schemes, excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging and link exchange web rings.

24. Do not use unauthorized programs or online tools to submit your site, check page rankings or perform other automated queries. Avoid the risk of being flagged as a spammer.

25. Do not use hidden text and links. Show the search engines what you show to your vistors. It will greatly affect your site’s reputation.

26. Do not attempt to create pages that contain phishing, scam, virus, trojan, backdoor, spyware, adware or other malicious programs.

27. Make your site useful and informative.

28. Improve your link building. Link to high PR websites. Quality of relevant links is far more important than quantity. Links will greatly improve your site’s visibility, popularity and ranking. Search engines consider links as votes to your site.

29. Check your page link structure. Every page should be reachable by a single static text link.

30. Be extra careful in purchasing SEO services. Some use illegal and questionable methods to improve rankings.

31. Do not buy or sell links.

32. Do not create sites that contain purely affiliate links and no valuable content that is useful to users.

I hope these tips will add more popularity and visibility to your site. Enjoy!

About The Author
Edwin Reyes is a Web Developer and the Webmaster of Findmesoftware.com, a Philippine based website that provides free software downloads, tools, reviews, online tips, blogging resources, tutorials and Free SEO Tools and Software Download.