Search Engine Optimization Check List of Don’ts.

Whether you are starting your own Website or you already have it online, there are some SEO practices that you should absolutely avoid at all costs in 2007, what probably worked in the past may not be working today. Many of these techniques can directly lead to your site being banned from the major search engines, as per their Terms of Service.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a series of techniques used to give better placements to Websites in Search Engines and a better exposure on the Internet such us: Finding the appropriate keywords, building titles, meta-tags, optimizing pages, building the appropriate site and link structure, submitting to Directories, etc, so sites can be easily found by Internet users, to increase the number of visitors and their conversion rate.

I came across a good article with an SEO checklist of don’ts for 2007, from Search Engine Land, a trustable source from Danny Sullivan a well known and respected SEO Consultant. Check the article and the comments section, as the commentators made the list grow larger.

I also invite you to check the new section on Search Engine Land: “Small is Beautiful”, it’s a section of SEO articles for small businesses, where columnists offer creative advice and tips that smaller, nimble search marketers can exploit to gain a competitive advantage online.

Google Webmaster Guidelines Updated

One essential subject to learn when starting on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about the Google Webmaster Guidelines. This Guide will take you through the Dos and Don’ts so your site can be found, indexed and ranked.

Google is considered today one of the top Search Engines delivering quality and quantity traffic to Websites (around 70%) next to Yahoo and Msn.

They recently updated their Guidelines which will help you answer many of the questions you may have related to Google and SEO, it approaches important topics like:

- What to do when your Website is ready
- Design and content guidelines for your Website
- Technical guidelines
- Quality guidelines

Check out the document: Google Webmaster Guidelines, it will give you the basic information to start working on your Website once it’s ready.

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I.T. Certifications
220-601 is fared better when attempted after 642-611 and 70-270. However, the eligibility criteria does not ask much other than 70-293. Still going beyond 70-293 is a good idea.
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I found a great article at seomoz.org, about Google’s Ranking Factors, it’s a must read. Top SEO Practitioners like Aaron Walls, Bill Slawski, Jill Whalen, Michael Gray, Danny Sullivan, and others voted on the factors they estimate are the most important used on Google’s Ranking Algorithm to determine the placement of a web site in the search engine result pages (SERP’s) when an Internet user is doing a specific search. Google’s Ranking Algorithm is the mathematical formula they use to calculate which results to display and that are most suitable to the searcher query.

Ranking factors are attributes present in a Web page and are used to tell Search Engines what the web page is about and by which search engines determine the importance of a Website based on the website’s relevance and related keywords…

So seomoz.org gave to the task, this is their second and most updated version of the ranking factors. They are presented in several categories, each evaluated in several related components. The following are the most significant factors taken in account for the evaluation of factors that are considered to be important when doing SEO for a Web Page:

Keyword Use Factors:
- Keyword use in title tag
- Keyword use in the body text
- Keyword use in H1 tag
- Relationship of body text content to keywords
- Keyword use in domain name
- Keyword use in H2, H3, H(x) tags
- Keyword use in URL
- Keyword use in alt tags and image titles
- Keyword use in bold/strong tags
- Keyword use in meta description tag
- Keyword use in meta keywords tag

Page Attributes
- Link popularity within the site’s internal link structure
- Quality/Relevance of links to external Sites/Pages
- Age of document
- Amount of indexable text content
- Quality of the document content (as measured algorithmically)
- Organization/Hierarchy of document flow (i.e. broad > narrow)
- Frequency of updates to page
- Number of trailing slashes (/) in URL
- Accuracy of spelling & grammar
- HTML validation of document (to W3C Standards)

Site/Domain Attributes
- Global link popularity of Site
- Age of Site
- Topical relevance of inbound links to Site
- Link popularity of Site in topical community
- Rate of new inbound links to Site
- Relevance of Site’s primary subject matter to query
- Manual Authority/Weight given to Site by Google
- Top Level Domain extension of Site (edu, gov, us, ca, com, etc)
- Rate of new pages added to Site
- Number of queries for Site/Domain over time
- Verification of Site with Google Webmaster Central
- Historical performance of Site as measured by time spent on page, clickthroughs from SERPs, direct visits, bookmarks, etc.

Inbound Link Attribute
- Anchor text of inbound link
- Global link popularity of linking Site
- Topical relationship of linking Page
- Link popularity of Site in topical Community
- Topical relationship of linking Site
- Age of link
- Text surrounding the link
- Internal link popularity of linking page within Host Site/Domain
- PageRank (as measured by the Google Toolbar) of linking page
- Domain Extension of linking Site (edu, gov, com, ca, co.uk, etc)
- Temporal link attributes (when in time the link was created/updated)

Negative Crawling/Ranking Attributes
- Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
- Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index
- External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
- Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages
- Overuse of Targeted Keywords (Stuffing/Spamming)
- Participation in Link Schemes or Actively Selling Links
- Very Slow Server Response Times
- Inbound Links from Spam Sites
- Low Levels of Visitors to the Site (Measured via Toolbar, Clicks in SERPs, etc.)

The above list of factors was given to top SEO Practitioners to evaluate each of them in terms of the significance in Google’s Algorithm to display results in its SERPs. So go on and read it; it’s a must read article if you want to know the insights and what the top Search Engines Optimizers’ results of the evaluation was.

This is a list of essential search engine optimization strategies, you will probably learn some other in the long run, but right now I want to give you a list of the initial SEO techniques you have to have in mind when thinking on building your own website.

These practices will increase your chances of getting indexed by Search Engines, better rankings in the search engine’s result pages (serps) and possibly increase the amount of traffic to your site.

SEO is about a series of techniques you do to your website in order to improve the quantity and quality of visitors.

Here are some of the most important practices:

1- Get your own domain name (preferred if it is .com, is the most used on the Internet and people are already used to it). You can check Godaddy.com, to buy your domain name, they’re a Company with good reputation online.

2- Get your own, reliable hosting (a place where your web page is stored to be permanently available to visitors) for your site. A couple of hosting sites you can check are: Dreamhost.com or Pair.com.

3- Do a thoroughly keyword research to find out which are the most important words you should be using in your site, related to your main topic.

4- Add Titles, keywords and descriptions on the head of your page code. Each should be unique and related to the page.

5- Add a robots.txt file at the root of your server: e.g.: http://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt

6- Add a Sitemap page to your site: It should contain each page of your site, is like and index for your site, it will help guide visitors and search engine robots for better indexing.

7- Use CSS (cascading style sheets) to arrange the presentation of your Web site. It’s used to define colors, font and layout. This will help you improve the ratio of text/code of your Website, you want to have more text than code.

8- Use your keywords to describe the images in your site: alt tags.

9- Make sure you use H1 and H2 tags for the headings and subheadings of your site, using your keywords.

10- Write articles including your main keywords. Don’t worry about keyword density or frequency, what’s most important is that your article is compelling and useful to your visitors.

11- Link to relevant, quality sites using contextual links (using the keyword of your site).

12- Make sure you don’t have broken links in your site.

13- Try to use bread crumbs on the top of your pages, to make sure your visitors know where they are in your site, e.g.: Home > Marketing > Link Building. This will tell them they are reading an article of the link building section of the category marketing.

14- Get rid of java scripts in the code of your page and put it in an external file.

15- Build 404 pages (when someone reaches to a page that is not found in your site it will show the visitor a custom message instead of getting an error page and loose that visitor). For instance the message could say: Sorry the page you have reached does not exist, please go to our home page: http://www.yoursite.com .

16- Once this is all done submit your site to major Search Engine and Directories and start building links to your site, of course that’s a subject for another post.

You will find a lot more techniques to add to your SEO list of basic practices, but for now these ones will help you get started. Good luck.

Keyword research is a vitally important aspect of any search engine optimization campaign. If your site is targeting the wrong keywords, the search engines and your customers may never find you, resulting in lost dollars and meaningless rankings.

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Google decided to share it’s secret weapon with the rest of the world to help spread their passion for testing, and to provide a fun and easy way for you to educate yourself and the rest of your company about these important tricks and techniques.

It’s about Google’s Testing on the Toilet Program, they write flyers about everything from dependency injection to code coverage (every thing they want to do a test about), and then regularly plaster the bathrooms all over Google with each episode, almost 500 stalls worldwide. They’ve received a lot of feedback about it so far.

Their main slogan is ”Debuging sucks, testing rocks”.  Google wants us to try it’s best practices program for testing new stuff, so they will be posting in a regular basis on their blog Google Testing on the Toilet practices program , providing PDFs so we can print them out and place them in our bathrooms, and send them  photos and stories to TotT@google.com to let them know how Testing on the Toilet is received at your company, maybe we should give it a try.

Welcome to SEO Practices, you will find the latest and best resouces to Search Engine Optimization and Marketing for beginners.

You can check the following:

SEO for Newbies at Netscape.com

SEO for Newbies Articles at Digg.com

SEO for Newbies at Del.icio.us

SEO for Newbies at Squidoo