Categories
SEO

SEO guidelines

  1. Submit your site to the major search engines for indexing:
    1. http://www.google.com/addurl/
    2. http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
    3. http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx
  2. Check that your robots.txt file is correct and not preventing crawlers from getting into your site: http://www.robotstxt.org/
  3. Use Video and Flash sparingly, and knowing it doesn’t get indexed by crawlers
  4. Promote important content to home page, and make sure there are clean links from the home page to your site’s key content.
  5. Avoid duplicated content.
    1. If two or more urls on your site are pointing to the same content, use Canonical Urls as follows (to indicate the page to be indexed):  <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://example.com/original_content_here”>
    2. Use plugings for CMS packages to avoid this problem: http://yoast.com/wordpress/canonical/, http://yoast.com/tools/magento/canonical/
  6. Use friendly URLs with keywords about your content on it. It is ok to use the “-” sign to separate words.
  7. Use Meta tags to describe your page content.
  8. The page title is really important, make sure you choose one with keywords about your content as well.
  9. H1 headings: as important as page title, h2-h6 not as important but also take them into account.
  10. The first 100 words of your content carry more weight than the rest, use them wisely.
  11. For images, use descriptive image names, as well as good alt tags for them.
  12. The following online tools could help:
    1. http://www.google.com/insights/search/#
    2. http://www.seomoz.org/term-extractor