1. Keywords to target
Finding the right keywords is one of the most important tasks where tons of people fail. A lot of our clients screw up by “shooting for the stars“ instead of looking at the reality. Here’s a rough strategy of how to find the proper keywords:
a. Look at your current backlink structure and the one of your competitors
b. Identify your current keyword rankings with tools such as SEMRush
c. Google results and make sure universal search doesn’t dilute the results
d. Check the search volume for your keyword
2. Splash page
Splash pages were cool in 2000, but in 2010 splash pages are a waste for the user and search engines. The problem is that search engines will spider the splash page as your main page instead of the one with the content.
3. Popups / Layers and other nonsense
Popups are as useless as Splash pages and Google hates it. Whether it’s a regular popup an exit popup or a layers it’s advised not to use any. It’s been rumored that it kills your rankings when detected.
4. No Deeplinking
A deep link is a hyperlink that points to a specific page or image on a website, instead of that website’s main or home page .Make sure to mix it up and don’t point all links to your homepage. Also note that there is no average deep-link ratio. The ratio depends on the nature of the site and industry.
5. Meta Tags
Keyword stuffing in the Meta tags doesn’t work in 2010. Google claimed in a post that they no longer even look at the meta-keywords in order to rank your website. So stop stuffing keywords and concentrate on links and content.
6. Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is content which is duplicate or near duplicate in nature. Search engines do not want to index multiple versions of similar content (but still do it). If you have websites with identical content, scraped or recycled content, e-commerce product info (manufacturer info), participate in article distribution or have printer-friendly pages, there is a chance that it negatively impacts your SEO. Make sure your content is fresh and unique.
7. Link velocity
Link building is like a marathon. Keep links growing week after week after week.
8. Robots.txt
Never disallow crawlers to stop by (unless there is an issue). Make sure to guide crawlers throughout your pages. Make sure bots are also not blocked via meta tags.
9. Sitemap
Sitemaps are an easy way to inform search engines and users about the pages. Put a sitemap up or submit it to the engines via XML.
10. Hosting
Try to host in good neighborhoods and don’t engage in hosted template companies, which are all sitting on the same IP.