Top 12 SEO Tips Part 1

2. Check your site for errors

I regularly run Xenu or Screaming Frog SEO Spider to identify orphan files, links or other on-page issues. I’ve used Xenu for years but since it is not an SEO Tool the elements that it checks have grown outdated. Screaming Frog checks the following;

● Errors – Client & server errors (4XX, 5XX)

● Redirects – (3XX, permanent or temporary)

● External Links – All followed links and their subsequent status codes

● URI Issues – Non ASCII characters, underscores, uppercase characters, dynamic uris, over 115 characters

● Duplicate Pages – Hash value / MD5checksums lookup for pages with duplicate content

● Page Title – Missing, duplicate, over 70 characters, same as h1, multiple

● Meta Description – Missing, duplicate, over 156 characters, multiple

● Meta Keyword – Mainly for reference as it’s only (barely) used by Yahoo the last time I checked. Missing, duplicate, multiple

● H1 – Missing, duplicate, over 70 characters, multiple

● H2 – Missing, duplicate, over 70 characters, multiple

● Meta Robots – Index, noindex, follow, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noodp, noydir etc

● Meta Refresh – Including target page and time delay

● Canonical link element

● File Size - SPEED COUNTS

● Page depth level

● Inlinks – All pages linking to a URI

● Outlinks – All pages a URI links out to

● Anchor Text – All link text. Alt text from images with links

● Follow & Nofollow – At link level (true/false)

● Images – All URIs with the image link & all images from a given page. Images over 100kb, missing alt text, alt text over 100 characters

● Custom Source Code Search – The spider allows you to find anything you want in the source code of a website! Whether that’s analytics code, specific text, or code etc.

3. Write your content with a LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis)

Semantic technology is the process of signaling what kind of content you are publishing on an item-by-item or field-by-field basis, publishers can help make the meaning of their text readable by machines. If machines are able to determine the meaning of the content on a page, then our human brains don’t have to waste time determining, for example, which search results go beyond containing our keywords and actually mean what we are looking for.

Because of this move, we will now be able to clearly designate content on a page as related to other particular content. More sites than ever are now utilising CMS (Content Management Systems) and these provide a fantastic spring-board for this type of tool to flourish. Where this will play into both flat, html based websites and CMS populated sites is that much like the meta tags and descriptions of the past, content owners will now be able to provide structured data to Yahoo for potential display in enhanced listings in search results.

One example would be to use a WordPress style application that will interlink similar content pages by using keyword sets identified through your log files or a program like Hittail. This is still in its early stages but Google has also shown signs of adopting this technology as well. Forward thinking here will definitely pay off in the future. Yahoo wishes to incorporate micro formatting FOAF, geoRSS, hReview and hAtom in order to initially fuel this engine. This means that website elements such as forums, reviews and feedback. This means that social networking and viral content will play an increasingly significant role in the way that websites rank organically. There is a ton of other information available on this, but not enough room or time right here. Just mark my words…Do your homework on this and you could find yourself riding the top ten with nothing but bluer skies to come.

Hot Tip #3 – Use Hittail to find actual search queries that people are using to find your website and inject these terms (3,4,5 & 6 keyword phrases) into your content. Even if there is a different word that basically has the same meaning (I.e. Lorry & Truck), use these as well. This is what LSI is designed to do. Spending the time and money to build a CMS that uses all of these variations will put your site well ahead of the competition.

4. On-Page Advertising - Ditch it

Remove advertisement from your index page, unless its making you rich, take them all off. I have proven this to be a negative factor and even one that can draw a marginal penalty of 10 or so spots. Your own banners are okay, it’s the 3 adsense blocks, 4 adbrites and the rest of the lot that makes it look just like an Affiliate portal.

5. Use Subomains Effectively

Let me say this loud and clear; Google treats subdomains as individual websites. So blog.yoursite.com is a completely different website than yoursite.com. The key to this strategy is to link the main site to the subdomain. This passes the trust and authority from the main site and passes it to the subdomain website.

In the above example you can see that bingoplayeronline.com is ranking second and third for a long tail search phrase. This is one terrific reason to us sub domains rather than subdirectories.

12 SEO Tips Part 3

 

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