SEO Bible: Criteria For Optimizing and Improving Ranking

November 7, 2007 by Denis Sureau

List of criteria which will obtain a better indexing and which optimize the site to improve its ranking and gives it a better position in search engine results.

Coding:
+ Favorable factor.
- Unfavorable factor.

Hosting

+ Geolocation: the host is located in a country corresponding to the language of the site or involved in its activity.

- Frequent interruptions of service.
- Slowness.

Domain name

+ Contains keywords in the topic of the site.
+ A generic top-level domain (com, net, org, biz) matches the type of site. Net worth to an activity of network and org to a non-profit activity.
+ Or it is the language or the location of the site, for example fr for a site in french, us for a site about the United States.

- Is redirected by a frame on the host.
- Too long name.
- Contains a trademark name (it might be withdrawn).

Topic of the site

+ Start your website with a well-defined and measurable goal. Choose precisely the topic.

- Addressing various topics in a same site is bad.

Site structure

+ Hierarchical organization: homepage-> main topics. Topics -> articles.
+ Name of subdirectories corresponding to the topic of the content.
+ Presence of a robots.txt file.
+ XML Sitemap linked from robots.txt.
+ Presence of an RSS feed.

- Using frames.

Organization of a page

+ The file name of pages are made of the main keywords in the content of the page, separated by a dash.
+ Title into a H1 tag. It can describe the content of the page or be addictive.
+ Subtitles in H2, H3, etc. tags.
+ The headings and subheadings contain keywords, about the page for H1, about the chapter for H2.
+ Using style sheets.
+ Place CSS and JavaScript code in separate files, to speed page load and to emphasize the content.

- Too large-size text or file too heavy to load.
- No text in the page (images only).
- Too many ads, over 10% of the space.
- Html, body, head tags or other non closed or absent.
- Lack of a charset.
  Its format is (iso-8859-1 may be replaced by UTF-8):

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

- Hidden text or hidden links in the code of the page.
- Using tables, presentation attributes of HTML as font, color, etc.

The title tag

+ The title tag is mandatory. It can be the title in H1. On the home page, it may include the name of the site.
+ The syntax is <title> text of title </title>, and it occurs in head section of the HTML code of the page.

- Same text in the title on all pages.
- Text made of a series of keywords.
- Text beginning with the name of the site on all pages.

The description meta tag

+ It can be used for description displayed in the results pages of search engines.
+ Size less than 160 characters.
+ The format is

 <meta name="description" content="desc..."> 

- Description made of a series of keywords. Rather, it must contain true phrases including keywords.

Images

+ Presence of an alt attribute that describes the image.

<img alt="" >

External links

+ The correct form is:

 <a href="absolute url "> anchor </a>

+ Links on pages with a PageRank above 3.

- Remove broken links. Use regularly a tool for automation detection, see in resources.
- Using nofollow (external link should be taken into account by the engines, it add value to the page).
- Links on pages unrelated to the source.
- Same links repeated in the footers.
- More than 100 links in a page.

Internal links

+ The URL is an absolute address containing the name of the site and the protocol (http://).
+ This text is a description of the target page and it contains main keywords of this page.

- Dynamic JavaScript links.
- Using nofollow (that means the link is not taken into account by search engines).
- Avoid 302 redirects.

Backlinks

+ Backlinks of reference sites or pages with a high PageRank.
+ Presence in the Dmoz directory and the most important ones.

- Sudden increase of backlinks by inscriptions on many directories.
- Source of backlinks are only directories or sites where one add oneself the link.
- Using the same title and the same description in the submission to directories.
- Links from blacklisted sites , who lost their PageRank.
- Links from satellite pages created for this purpose.
- Loss of backlinks without replacement by other (eg a RSS not renewed).
- Coming from participation in a network sales of links.