Top 10 Onsite SEO Practices

Part 2 of The ABCs Of Internet Marketing
Top 10 On-Site SEO Practices

SEO and SMM Terms

Jerusalem Web Professionals
Tuesday, June 12, 2012

On-Site SEO is the practice of
optimizing content and technology
within your own website so that it
ranks higher in search engines.

Two Main Areas of Practice
Clean and Functional Code
Optimized Content

1) SEF URLs
(Search Engine Friendly Uniform Resource Locators)
2) 301 Redirects
3) Title & Description Tags
4) Keyword Spamming
5) Sitemaps
6) Robots.txt
7) H1 H2 tags and proper HTML formating
8) Image use and alt tags
9) Text links with attributes
10) 404 (Page Not Found) Errors

SEF URLs
(Search Engine Friendly Uniform Resource Locators)

http://wines.com/dry-red-wine/barkan-merlot-2004.php
vs
https://checkout.store.com/catalog/index.jsp?cat_id=1013

SEF URLs
Use keywords in the domain, directory names and
filenames
Do not use generic or structural words (catalog,
about-us)
Have short content-related URLs
Use lowercase URLS
Do not mix www and non-www in internal links
Google recommends that you punctuate with
hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your
URLs

SEF URLs

Be Aware of Problematic URLs
Search Results
Calendars
Use cookies instead of session Ids

SEF URLs

Block Indexing in your robots.txt
For a site like
http://www.wine.com/wine-search-results.jsp?Ne=292&N=461+4294967240+4294967270

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /wine-search-results.jsp

SEF URLs

Google suggests add a nofollow attribute to
dynamically created links.
However, if these are linked from other sources,
search engines will find them.
Block pages with a no index meta tag in the template
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">
as opposed to
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX, FOLLOW">

SEF URLs

Check your site for broken URLs (links).
Test with GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOL
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Creating a Google-friendly URL structure:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.
py?hl=en&answer=76329

SEF URLs & 301 Redirects

Only have one Domain
Use no follow links and 301 redirect
Use Apache's htaccess guide
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html

Guidelines for
Title & Description Tags
Google uses title and description tags
They do not say they use the keyword tag.
Use keywords in tags but avoid keyword stuffing
Use "Old Words"
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/search-keywords.html
Be Descriptive and Accurate

META TAGS
google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=79812

Guidelines for
Title tag is used by Google for indexing
Title tag is displayed in search results
Each page title should be unique
Site name should be secondary, if at all

TITLE TAG

Guidelines for META Tags
<HTML>

<HEAD>
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="PUT DESCRIPTION HERE">
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="GOOGLE DOESN'T USE KEYWORDS TAG">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW">
<TITLE>
PUT YOUR TITLE HERE
</TITLE>
</HEAD>

<BODY>

</BODY>

</HTML>

Guidelines for

Guidelines for
Avoid: <title>Home</title>
Better: <title>Webmaster Central home page</title>
Best:
<title>Webmaster Central home page | Search engine tips and tools for
webmasters</title>
To be avoided (may cause your site to be perceived as spam):
<title>Webmaster Central seo optimization search engine search engine
google web search google search results improve search results seo
optimize search searching serps</title>

TITLE TAG

Guidelines for
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="">
Description used by Search engines
Should be no more than 150 characters, no less
than 70 characters
Different descriptions for each page
Use appropriate format
<meta name="Description" content="Author: A.N. Author,
Illustrator: P. Picture, Category: Books, Price: $17.99, Length:
784 pages">

“Word Spamming,” “Keyword
Stuffing,” “Keyword Density”
Best strategy: Write good relevant content for humans
Be aware of single keywords and keyphrases of two or
three terms
Keyword Density should not exceed 6%
Online Tools
http://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/keyword-density.html
http://www.keydensity.com/
http://www.keyworddensity.com/

Webmaster Tools: Sitemaps
Text file called sitemap.xml in your root directory
A list of URLs or sitemaps
Specify all URLs using the same syntax
Do not include session IDs in URLs
Do not include URLs of images

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8467

Definitions for each URL in a Sitemap
Location (URL)
Time it was last modified
How often it is updated
Priority


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2012-06-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>


Sitemap generators
On-line: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
Software: We use RAGE Sitemap Automator (For Mac)
http://www.ragesw.com/products/googlesitemap.html
Submit your sitemap after verifying your site on Google
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
On-line services submit to Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com, MSN (Live.com) and
Moreover.com.
http://www.sitemapwriter.com/notify.php
Submit using your robots.txt file
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

robots.txt
To exclude all robots from the entire server To exclude a single robot

User-agent: * User-agent: BadBot

Disallow: / Disallow: /

To allow all robots complete access To allow a single robot

User-agent: * User-agent: Google

Disallow: Disallow:
User-agent: *
To exclude all robots from part of the server
Disallow: /
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/ To exclude all files except one

Disallow: /tmp/ User-agent: *

Disallow: /junk/ Disallow: /~joe/stuff/

Proper Use of HTML Tags (H1, H2)
<H1>Main Title</H1>
<H2>Subtitle</H2>
<H3>Heading</H3>

<ul>List
<li>List Item</li>
<li>List Item</li>
</ul>

Proper Use of Images
Never Use An Image Instead of Text

(What Not To Do)
http://www2.kenes.com/mascc

Proper Use of Images
Always use Alt Text

Use Text Links and Title Attribute

For More on SEO Tips and Wordpress

http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

Thank You
Charlie Kalech
Director, J-Town Productions Ltd.
www.j-town.co.il
charlie@j-town.co.il
@CharlieKalech

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http://facebook.com/jtownproductions

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Top 10 Onsite SEO Practices

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