Domain Name

• When registering a domain name, choose one which contains the keywords you would like to target, and which accurately describes what your site is about. For example, if your site contains dessert recipes, the ideal domain would be dessertrecipes.com. However, that domain might be taken, so try to register variations of that phrase, such as dessert-recipes.com or dessert-recipes-central.com or another tld.
• Try to register a .com domain, as far as possible. However, if you want to rank in a certain country, it is a good idea to register the extension of the country. For example, if you own a hair salon in UK, you would want to target people in UK. In this case, choose a domain with an extension of .co.uk.

Page Titles

• Should be highly relevant to the page
• Should contain targeted keywords
• Should be a maximum of 65 characters long

Read more about title tags for seo.

Meta Descriptions

• Should accurately describe the content of the page
• Should be about 160 characters long.
• Should be written for HUMANS, although you should sprinkle a couple of keywords in them.

Read more about the meta description tag.

Meta Keywords Tag

• Not really important, ignored by most crawlers, so it can be avoided.
• If using it, don’t add more than 5 keywords to a page.

Robots Meta Tag

• You can use them to prevent crawlers from indexing certain pages like the sitemap etc.
• Only use these if you know what you are doing!

Before using them, read more about the robots meta tag.

Headings

• Your pages should be properly structured, and should make use of the heading tags.
• Although they can go upto h6, I only generally use the h1 and h2 and at times the h3 tag.
• Make sure that you include your keywords in the heading tags.
• There is not length limit as such, but my heading are generally 5-6 words at maximum.
• Don’t skip levels i.e. dont jump from the h1 to the h3.
• Do not use more than one H1 on a page! The H1 is meant to be used for the top level heading, and so there should be only one H1 on a page.
• However, there can be any number of h2-h6 tags on a page.

Keyword Density

• Most people have different views about keyword density and what the optimal keyword density is. My view is that as long as the content is natural and readable, and you haven’t stuffed keywords in, its alright.
• I checked my pages, and on average, my keyword density is approximately 1.5%. I am not saying that this is the optimal value, I’m just saying as long as you write naturally and include your keywords at places ( but not everywhere!),  you’ll be fine.
• Read this article to learn about seo guru’s views about keyword density, and use this tool to calculate the keyword density of a page.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

• Pick between the non www and www urls of your site, and redirect the other to it. I like to redirect the non www to the www.  Just add the following code to the .htaccess file:
  RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
  Remember to Replace example.com with your domain name
• Use Clean, Search engine friendly urls which are keyword rich, rather than dynamic urls containing characters like ‘?’. I try to keep my urls as short as possible, so i don’t generally include words like for, in, if etc in them. For example, if my post is title ‘20 Awesome SEO Tools you should use’, my url would be domain.com/seo-tools or something of that sort.

Optimising Images

• Use the alt tag to describe the image, remembering to include some keywords.
• Keep the images of a reasonable size, and upload images to a seperate folder.
• use keywords in the image file name
• use keywords in the image title
• limit the number of images per page, as they increase loading time
• place relevant text in the vicinity of the image.

Miscellaneous Tips

• Sign up for a Google Account and use Google’s Webmasters Tools
• Build an XML Sitemap for your site, and submit it in Webmaster Tools.
• Put some keywords in bold and italic tags, as these are given more weight in some search engines. Don’t overdo this, and do this only if it looks natural!
• Make your your site has valid HTML and CSS.
• Check for broken links and correct them. You wouldn’t want your site to be full of 404’s!
• Always link to other relevant pages on your site!
• When linking to other pages, always use keyword rich and descriptive anchor texts, rather than anchor texts like ‘click here’.
• Make sure your content is unique. Don’t just copy content from other pages.
• Sometimes, there can be a problem of on-site duplicate content, where the same content occurs at many places in your website. This generally happens in blogs, where the same content will be on the category page, home page, archive page, author page etc. You can limit this by noindexing pages you don’t require, such as the author page for a single author blog. Also, only shows excerpts on the home page, archive pages etc.
• If possible, use a simple text based navigation rather than an image based navigation.

Related posts:

1. Meta Description Tags in SEO
2. Title Tags for Search Engine Optimisation
3. Robots Meta Tag for SEO

Robots meta tag is a meta tag used to instruct robots on how to deal with a certain page in terms of indexing, following and archiving.

Robots meta tag usage:

The robots meta tag is inserted into the head section of a page.

A simple example of a robots meta tag in an html document

<html>
<head>
<title>This is the Title</title>
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="content">
</head>
<body>
body text
</body>
</html>

The name attribute of the meta tag should always be “robots”.
The content attribute can have several parameters namely : index, noindex, follow, nofollow

Here are the various forms that robots meta tag can take:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”INDEX, FOLLOW”>
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”>
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”INDEX, NOFOLLOW”>
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>

Robots meta Tag notes

• The default value is “index, follow” so there is no need to specify this directive.
• “index” means that the pages should be indexed in search engines
• “follow” means that robots should follow the links on the page
• “noindex” means that the page should not be indexed in search engines
• “nofollow” means that robots should not follow the links on a page.
• Another directive which can be specified in the content attribute is “noarchive”. This prevents the caching of pages by search engines.
• The content attribute of the robots meta tag can also be “none” which is the same as using “noindex, nofollow”.

Importance of Robots meta tag

1. To prevent the indexing of certain pages like the sitemap, login pages.
2. To prevent the following of links on certain pages.

Conclusion

The robots meta tag, while not being very important in determining rankings, should be used carefully and effectively to make sure that only the required pages are indexed by search engines. Also, I would like to end by saying, that if you use wordpress, install the robots meta plugin and save yourself some hard work

Related posts:

1. Meta Description Tags in SEO
2. The Ultimate On Site Optimisation Guide
3. Title Tags for Search Engine Optimisation

What is the Meta Description Tag?

The meta description tag is a snippet of html code inserted in the head section of a page, used to briefly describe the content on a particular page. Search engines show a pages meta description as the description of the page when it appears in search results.

Meta Description Tag Usage:

The Meta Description Tag is inserted in the head section of an html document. It is common practice to insert it after the title tag.

The Format of the meta description tag is such :

<meta name=”description”  content=”This is the description of your page. Keep it brief.”>

Importance of Meta Description Tag:

• The Meta description tag does play a role ( although small ) in Search Engine Rankings
• The Meta description tag plays an important role in determining clickthrough’s from search engines, as Search engines show the pages meta description as the description of the page in search results. Pages with good meta descriptions are likely to get larger number of visitors form search engines.

Meta Description Tag Tips

1. Try to keep the Meta Description Tag length to about 25 – 30 words or 160 characters including spaces. This ensures that the full descripiton displays in search engines
2. Include your primary keywords in your meta description tag (You may have noticed that your searched keywords are shown im bold wherever they occur in a sites title and description) but DON’T overdo it. Write your Meta description tag for Humans not Search Engines since Meta description tags play a more important part in clickthrough’s than in search engine rankings.
3. Avoid using your websites URL in the meta description tag, it does not help you at all, but it takes away valuable space.
4. Write an honest description, making it interesting at the same time. Dont claim to have some information you don’t, but make the meta description tag interesting at the same time. Think of it like an ad for your website.

Conclusion

Meta descripton tags are important tags for On Page SEO and for determining clickthrough’s from search engines. You should spend some time implementing them on each and every page you want to rank for. Include your keywords, but make sure that the description is readable and enticing for humans to click on.

Related posts:

1. Robots Meta Tag for SEO
2. The Ultimate On Site Optimisation Guide
3. Title Tags for Search Engine Optimisation

What are Title Tags?

The Title Tag is an html tag inserted in the head section of an HTML document, which specifies the Title of the document.

Title Tag usage:

As mentioned earlier, the Title tag is inserted in the head section of an html document. Here is a sample html document with Title Tags.

<html>

<head>

<title>Title of the document goes here</title>

</head>

<body>
This is the content of the document.
</body>

</html>

Importance of the Title Tag:

• The Title tag is a very important part of On page SEO and thus a very important factor for achieving high rankings in Search Engines.
• The Title Tag determines the title of the page as it appears in search engines, thus a good title which attracts the user gets clicked on more.

Tips for Writing the best Title Tag:

1. Always include your targeted keywords in the Title Tag
2. Try to keep your Title Tags to below 65 characters in length. This ensures that the full title displays in Google.
3. Remember that words placed in the beginning of the Title tag are given more weight by search engines, and draft your Title Tags accordingly.
4. It is a good idea to mention multiple keywords in the Title Tag, but mention your most targeted keywords in the beginning.
5. Use a divider such as a hyphen or a “|” symbol to separate the Website Name from the keywords.
6. In case of a company site,  you *should* include the Company Name in the title, maybe even in the beginning, as this helps in branding your company. That said, you shouldn’t include just the company name, but instead you should follow the company name with your targeted keywords.
   Example: AB Corporation – SEO Services, New York
7. Never start your title tag with Welcome to or Welcome or Home.  I am pretty sure these are not the words you want to rank for, so why waste valuable space of your Title Tag by including, let alone starting with such words in the Title Tag?

That’s about it from me for now. Hope you enjoyed the article. Please feel free to leave a comment or ask me any query you might have.

Related posts:

1. Meta Description Tags in SEO
2. The Ultimate On Site Optimisation Guide
3. Robots Meta Tag for SEO