Thread: 32 Most Important SEO Tips

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

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

2. When your site is ready, submit it to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com. Consider also submitting to other search engine but most of them are powered by these four leading search engines. Submit also 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 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 same content.

6. Check your keywords and make sure they are relevant and actually are contained in your site. Avoid keywords 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. Title tag should be 60-80 characters maximum length.

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

11. Meta Tag keywords 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 engines' spiders having difficulty indexing dynamic pages.

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

16. Use Lynx as text browser to check your site. (http://lynx.isc.org/)

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 last crawled your site. It will save you bandwidth, resources and avoid server overload.

19. Use Robots.txt file to manage and control search engine spiders in indexing your site. You can allow and disallow spiders and choose directories you want to be crawled and indexed. But 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 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 engines ranking.


22. Avoid links to bad neighborhood such as web spammers, link farms, phishing, hacker, crack, gambling, porn and scam sites. Linking to them will greatly affects 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 and other automated queries. Avoid the risk of being flagged as spam.

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

26. Do not attempt to create pages that contains phishing, scam, viruses, trojans, backdoors, spyware, adware and other malicious programs.

27. Make your site useful and informative.

28. Improve your link building. Link to high PR websites. Quality of relevant links are far more important than quantity. Links will greatly improve your site's visibility, popularity and rankings. 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 uses illegal and questionable ways to improve rankings.

31. Do not buy or sell links.

32. Do not create sites that contains purely affiliate links and no valuable content that are useful to the 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.

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

I was wondering how this trick was done? I don't have an intention of doing it,
I just like to know how to avoid it. By the way thanks for the informative list
it was really helpful, bookmarked it

i think it just refers to black hat techniques

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

Now why would we use Lynx, why not others.

Originally Posted by manik

Now why would we use Lynx, why not others.

hahaha.. your right man.. :Winner

27. Make your site useful and informative.

That's all.

Originally Posted by mit

27. Make your site useful and informative.

That's all.

yeah that's one of the most useful tip

Some very useful tips here

Good tips, but I thought MSN and Ask were powered by Yahoo nowadays.

Originally Posted by nottin

Good tips, but I thought MSN and Ask were powered by Yahoo nowadays.

lol how can MSN be powered by Yahoo??

This tips are very useful......

These tips are very basic and if anybody follow these tips get good traffic on website.

woah! very long post dude! btw, thanks for sharing! might read this later after work..

Thank you guys. Good to see that you all found it useful.

Top 5 Most Important SEO Tips you'll ever Read

The subject of SEO is the root of many heated conversations. Most people will tell you that you need to keep up with the latest happenings in the SEO world. Many of these people are either involved in black-hat techniques, or don't hold any impressive rankings in the first place because you simply do not need to know everything about SEO in order to rank well in the SERPS. Contrary to popular belief, you don't need to be an SEO "guru" to rank well in the Search Engines. There are only a handful of things you need to do in order to rank well. Those who concentrate on what’s important will quickly pass those who spend their time worrying about all of the little things that may or may not increase their rankings!

Below you will find the 5 most important SEO factors

1.Links

The quantity and quality of the links on the WWW which point to your site and it's sub pages is the #1 off-page SEO factor! When it comes to top Search Engine rankings the most influential factor really is the incoming links! Submit articles and do selective link exchanges to give your site a push-start and let your good content (below) bring it to the top!

2.Title and META Tags

The title and META description of each individual page is the most important on-page SEO factor! Craft your title and description in a way that is both Search Engine friendly (contains your primary keyword) and user friendly (convinces them to click.) Remember, if it is full of keywords and not user friendly, your rankings will not matter, as no one will click. If it is user friendly, but doesn't contain your main keyword, you will not rank as high as you would if it had your keyword (in most cases.)

3.Internal Linking

A good internal linking structure will not only show the SEO's which of your pages are more important, it can actually increase the rankings of those pages! Use the rel="no follow" attribute on links that don't need any "link juice" like your contact pages, about pages, affiliate links and duplicated pages.

4.Quality Content
Quality content will bring in "natural" links. If you're spitting out low-quality, rehashed content, you won't impress anyone. If you do not impress anyone your job will be much harder, as you'll have to manually build all of your links.

5.Keyword Density doesn't Matter

"Keyword Density" is no longer important. With the implementation of "Latent Semantic Indexing" (LSI) most major Search Engines do not rank a page higher because it contains a keyword a set number of times. Just write natural content and good things will come!

So to recap, build solid incoming links, compose a good title and META description, create a solid internal linking structure, write quality content and don't worry about keyword density!

This is the strategy that has worked for me in order to obtain front-page ranking for many competitive terms and I'm confident it will for you as well!

To see how I've conquered some of the most competitive keywords on the Internet, visit SEO Report where I provide my extremely popular for absolutely Free!