Søkemotoroptimalisering, Søkemotormarkedsføring, Internett Markedsføring og Digital Strategi Som Skaper Salg
White Hat Checklist for SEO (Sjekkliste for søkemotoroptimalisering)
This is a list of the elements that is important to rank well in the most important search engines that is Google, Bing, and Yahoo. But also on other search engines on the internet. Its written in English because half the words in this report is English anyway. And only SEO and marketing geeks like me will bother to read it… In addition when you write it in English it can give valuable link juice from other international sites
This list have positive, negative and neutral factors because all of them is present. Most of the factors in this list is written to help you rank in Google and partially to Bing and Yahoo.
The rating on the effects: +10 is essential and very effective, +1 just important. And the same scale is present on the – downside effects -10 is you will not get to the front page of Google and -1 is this is working against your efforts to rank high.
That’s just because they are the biggest search engines and most important for your SEO strategy.
Keywords in the main url
One of the most important ranking factors are your main domain. This is a part that’s getting a lot of weight from the search engines. But since this is not something you can change we are focusing on the other elements of optimizing your existing pages. (But you should have a top domain strategy for the most searched keywords to get a lot of free organic traffic.
1 Keywords in <title> tag
One of the most important places to have a keyword because what is written inside the <title> tag shows in search results as your page title. The title tag must be short (6 or 7 words at most) and the main keyword must be some of the first words. +10
2 Keywords in URL Keywords in page URLs help a lot – e.g. – http://stratcog.com/seo/ where “SEO” is the keyword phrase you attempt to rank well for. But you also have to have the keywords in other parts of the document, if not, its not enough to just having them in the URL. +10
3 Keyword density in document text
3-7 % for major keywords is great, 1-2 percent for minor keywords. Keyword density of over 10% is suspicious and looks like keyword stuffing, and not naturally written content. +10
4 Keywords in anchor text Very important, especially for the anchor text of inbound links, because if you have the keyword in the anchor text in a link from another site, this is regarded as getting a vote from this site not only about your site in general, but about this keyword in particular. +10
5 Keywords in headings
(<H1>, <H2>, etc. tags) One more place where keywords count a lot. But beware that your page has actual text about the particular keyword. +10
6 Keywords in the beginning of a document
But, have in mind that the beginning of a document does not necessarily mean the first sentence – for instance if you use tables, the first sentence of text might be in the second half of the table. +5
7 Keywords in tags
Spiders don’t read the image but they do read their descriptions in the tag, so if you have images on your page, fill in the tag with some keywords.. +5
8 Keywords in metatags
Less and less important, especially for Google. Yahoo! and Bing still rely on them, so if you are optimizing for Yahoo! or Bing, fill these tags properly. In any case, filling these tags properly will not hurt you. +3
9 Keyword proximity
This means how close in the text your keywords are. It is best if they are immediately one after the other (e.g. “insurance claim”), with no other words between them. For instance, if you have “insurance” in the first paragraph and “claim” in the third paragraph, this also counts but not as much as having the phrase “insurance claim” without any other words in between the words. Keyword proximity is applicable for keyword phrases that consist of 2 words or more. +3
10 Keyword phrases
You can also optimize for keyword phrases that consist of several words – e.g. “SEO link building”. It is best when the keyword phrases you optimize for are popular, so you can get a lot of exact matches of the search string but sometimes it makes sense to optimize for 2 or 3 separate words (“SEO” and “link building”) than for one phrase that might occasionally get an exact match. +3
11 Secondary keywords
Optimizing for secondary keywords can be a golden mine because when everybody else is optimizing for the most popular keywords, there will be less competition (and probably more hits) for pages that are optimized for the less popular words. As an example, “car service Bergen” might have thousand times less hits than “car service” only. But if you are operating in Bergen, you will get less but better targeted traffic. +3
12 Keyword stemming
For English this is not so much of a factor because words that stem from the same root (e.g. car, cars, etc.) are considered related and if you have “car” on your page, you will also get hits for “cars”, but for other languages keywords stemming could be an issue because different words that is from the same root could be considered as not related and you might need to optimize for all of the words. +3
13 Synonyms
Of the target keywords, in addition to the main keywords. This is good for sites in English, for which search engines are smart enough to use synonyms as well, when ranking sites but for many other languages synonyms are not taken into account, when calculating relevancy. +3
14 Spelling errors
Spelling errors does happen and if your target keywords have popular misspellings or alternative spellings (i.e. Sound effects and Sfx), you might think of optimizing for those words. Yes, this may get you some extra traffic but having spelling mistakes on your site does not make a good impression, so you’d better don’t do it, or only do it in the metatag where the visitors don’t see them. -1
15 Keyword dilution
If you are optimizing for lots of keywords, especially unrelated ones, this will affect the performance for all your keywords and even the major ones could be lost (diluted) in the text. -5
16 Keyword stuffing
Any ######## inflated keyword density (10% and over) is keyword stuffing and you risk getting banned from search results in the search engines. -10
Links – internal, inbound, and outbound
17 Anchor text of inbound links
This is one of the most important factors for good ranking in the search engines. The best is if you have a keyword in the anchor text but even if you don’t, it is still OK. But get as many back links as you can. Social bookmarking sites, forums, directories, blog posts, web 2.o sites, RSS feeds, etc… And remember to get “deep links” to your site, do not just give link juice to your top URL. +10
18 Origin of inbound links
It is important if the site that links to you is a good reputable site. Generally sites with greater Google PR are considered reputable, but don’t let the PR (Page rank) fool you. It can be a fairly new great site with a lower page rank. But high PR is always a great sign. +10
19 Links from similar sites
Having links from similar sites is very, very useful. It indicates that your competitors is voting for you and you are popular within your niche community. +10
20 Links from .edu and .gov sites
These links are precious because .edu and .gov sites are more reputable than .com. .biz, .net, etc. domains. But the other part of this is that such links are hard to obtain. +10
21 Number of backlinks
Generally the more, the better. But the reputation of the sites that link to you is more important than their number. Also important is the anchor text in the links, is there a keyword in it, how old are they, how many posts, etc. +10
22 Anchor text of internal links
This is also important, but not as much as the anchor text of inbound links. +5
23 Around-the-anchor text
The text that is surrounding the anchor text also matters because this indicates the relevance of the link – i.e. if the link is artificial or if it naturally blends in to the text. +5
24 Age of inbound links
The older, the better. Getting many new links in a short timeframe is a sign that you are buying them. +5
25 Links from directories
Great, though it strongly depends on which directories. Being listed in DMOZ, Yahoo and similar directories is a great ranking boost, but that’s not having tons of links from PR0 directories. This is of no value and it can even be regarded as link spamming, if you have hundreds or thousands of such links. +5
26 Number of outgoing links on the page that links to you
Few is better, because this way your webpage and links looks more important. +3
27 Named anchors
Named anchors (the target of internal links) are useful for internal navigation and its also useful for SEO because you show that an additional page, paragraph or text is important. In the code,
Organic SEO +and SEM,
uggs amsterdam, named anchors look like this: Read about the cars and “#cars” is the named anchor. +3
28 IP address of inbound link
Google denies that they discriminate against links that come from the same IP address or C class of addresses, so for Google the IP address can be considered neutral to the weight of inbound links. But both, Bing and Yahoo may discard links from the same IPs or IP classes, so it is always better to get links from different IPs. +3
29 Inbound links from link-farms or other bad “spammy” sites.
This does not affect you, provided that the links are not reciprocal. (you have a link pointing back to them) The idea is that it is beyond your control to define what pages a link farm links to, so you don’t get penalized when such sites link to you because this is not your fault. But you are better off to just stay away from link-farms and similar bad neighborhood sites. -1
30 Many outgoing links
Google does not like pages that consists mainly of links, so you’d better keep them under 100 per page. Having many outgoing links does not get you any benefits in terms of ranking and could even make your situation worse off. You leak link power for each site you links out to. So be careful of to many outgoing links. -3
31 Link spamming.
This is bad for your rankings, when you have many links from the same sites (even if it is not a cross-linking scheme or links to bad neighbors) because it will be counted as link-spam. And best case is that only some of the links are taken into account for in regard to your ranking. -3
32 Outbound links to link-farms and other bad sites.
Unlike inbound links from link-farms and other bad neighborhoods, outbound links to the same places will harm your ratings. You need to check the status of your links because good sites can become bad neighbors and vice versa. -10
33 Cross-linking.
This occurs when site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site C links back to the first site A. This is a simple example but more complex schemes are also possible. Cross-links like disguised link trading is penalized. -10
34 Small single “invincible” to human eye links.
If you have a link that is like a pixel or so big, it is invisible for humans, so nobody will click on it and it is obvious that this link is an attempt to manipulate search engines. The same goes for links thats hidden in the same color as the page -10
Metatags
35 metatag
Its not so important but if there are metatags that still matter,
ugg classic short, its the and tags. Use the tag to write the site description. And remember that metatags still rock on Bing and Yahoo, but the metatag has another advantage, it can pop up in the description of your site in the search results. +3
36 metatag
The metatag also matters, but as all metatags it gets almost no weight from Google, but some attention from Bing and Yahoo. Keep the metatag quite long – 10 to 20 keywords. Don’t stuff the tag with keywords that you don’t have on your page, this is bad for your rankings. +3
37 metatag Use the language-tag, don’t leave this empty.
Search engines have more sophisticated ways of determining the language of a page than relying on the metatag but they still consider it. +3
38 metatag. This metatag is a way to redirect visitors from your site to another site.
Only do it if you have recently migrated or moved your site to a new domain and you need to temporarily redirect visitors. When used for a long time, the metatag is considered as unethical practice and this can hurt your ratings. In any case, redirecting through permanent 301 is then a much better option. -3
Content and Copy
39 Unique content. More and better content and relevant content, which is different from the content on other sites both in wording and topics) is a real boost for your site’s rankings. +10
40 Frequency of content changes.
Updates and changes are favored. It is great when you constantly add new content but it is not so great when you only make small updates to existing content. +10
41 Keywords font size
With a keyword in the text that is in a larger font size than the other text on the page, is this some ting that makes it more noticeable, so the search engine sees it as this is more important than the rest of the text. The same rule for headings (<h1>, <h2>, etc.), which generally are set in larger size than the rest of the copy. +5
42 Keywords formatting
Bold and italic is also a method to emphasize important words and phrases. But, only use bold, italic and larger fonts within reason or otherwise you might achieve just the opposite effect. +5
43 Age of document
New documents (or regularly updated content) are favored. +5
44 File size
Generally heavy pages are not favored, or at least you can achieve better rankings if you have 3 lighter pages than 1 heavy page on a given topic, so split heavy pages into multiple smaller ones. But remember that the search engines also love content. So a 1200 word article on one page can be like dessert for a search engine. +3
45 Content separation
From a marketing point of view content splitting (based on IP, browser type, etc.) might be great, but for SEO it is bad because when you have one URL and differing content, search engines get confused what the actual content is on the site. -5
46 Poor coding and design
Search engines say that they do not want poorly designed and coded sites, though there are hardly sites that are banned because of messy code or ugly images but when design and coding of a site is poor, the site might not be indexable, so in this sense, poor code and design can harm your site. -5
47 Illegal Content
Using other sites copyrighted content without their permission or using content that promotes illegal actions can get you banned from the search engines. -10
48 Invisible text
A black hat SEO trick (illegal) and when spiders discover that you have text made specially for them but not for humans, don’t be surprised when you get the penalty. -10
49 Cloaking
Cloaking is also an illegal technique, this partially involves content separation because spiders see a highly-optimized page, and everybody else is presented with another version of the same page. -10
50 Doorway pages
Creating pages that is just made to trick spiders that your site is a highly-relevant, when it is not, is another way to get the banned from the search engines. -10
51 Duplicate content
When you have the same duplicate content on several pages on your site, this is not something that will make your site look larger and better, because the duplicate content penalty comes to play. Not so important for pages that reside on other sites and these cases are not always banned – i.e. directories, news groups, article sites, etc -10
Visual Effects and SEO
52 JavaScript
Use it sparingly and wisely, it will not hurt. But if your main content is displayed through JavaScript, it makes it a lot more difficult for spiders to follow it and if JavaScript code is a mess and spiders can’t follow it, it will absolutely hurt your ranking. -
53 Images in text
Having a text-only site is so boring but having many images and no text is a SEO sin. Always provide in the tag a meaningful image tag but don’t stuff it with keywords or even worse irrelevant information. -
54 Podcasts and videos
Podcasts and video are becoming more popular now that users have better internet connections but as with all non-textual goodies, search engines can’t read them, so if you don’t have the script of the podcast or the video, it is as if the podcast or movie is not there because it will not be indexed by search engines. But it will count that you have video, and the video can be displayd in your SERPs. But remember to set up a videositemap. +5
55 Images instead of text links
If you are using images instead of text links is this bad, especially when you don’t fill in the tag. But even if you do fill in the tag, it is not the same effect as having a bold and or underlined, 16-pt font. link,that’s why you only use images for navigation if this is really vital for the graphic layout of your site. Do not let the designer be your SEO specialist. -3
56 Frames
Frames catastrophic, and very bad for SEO. Avoid using them unless you have no way around it and must have it. -5
57 Flash
Spiders don’t index the content of Flash, so if you use Flash on the site, you have to make an alternative text description. -5
58 A Flash home page
Never ever bulid your site in flash only. Beautiful to look at, but it is useless for SEO. -10
Domains, URLs, and Web Authority
59 Keyword-rich URLs and filenames
A very important factor, especially for Yahoo and Bing. But build your urls search friendly… e.g: http://www.stratcog.com/2010/04/provosert-nei-metoden/ +10
60 Site Accessibility
Another fundamental issue, that is often forgotten. If the site (or pages) is not accessible because of broken links, 404 errors, password-protected areas and other similar reasons, then the site simply can’t be indexed. +10
61 Sitemap It is great to have a complete and up-to-date sitemap, the spiders love it, no matter if it is a plain old HTML sitemap or xml sitemap. +5
62 Site size
Spiders love large sites, so the bigger, the better. However, big sites can be difficult to navigate for the user, so sometimes it makes sense to separate a big site into several smaller ones. On the other hand, there are hardly sites that are penalized due to 10,000+ pages, so don’t split your page only because it is getting large. +5
63 Site age
Similarly to wine,
ugg australia uk, older sites are respected more than newer sites. The idea is that old established sites is more trustworthy (they have been around for a long time and are here to stay) other than a new site that has just published and might soon disappear again. +5
64 Site theme
It is not only keywords in URLs and on page that matter. The site theme is also important for good ranking because when the site fits into one theme, this boosts the rankings of all its pages that are related to the theme. +5
65 File Location
Site File location is important and files that are located in the root directory or near will often rank better than the files that are deep down 3 or more levels below. +3
66 Domains versus subdomains
Having a professional domain is the best – i.e. instead of having your www. yourname.freesite.com, register your own .com domain. +3
67 Top-level domains (TLDs)
Not all TLDs are equal. Some TLDs that are better than others. For instance, the most popular TLD – .com – is much better than .ws, .biz, or .info domains but nothing beats the .edu or .org domains. But you should be safe using .com .net. org or contry spesific domains +3
68 Hyphens in URLs
Hyphens between the words in an URL increase readability and help with SEO rankings. This applies both to hyphens in domain names and in the rest of the URL. +3
69 URL length
Generally doesn’t matter but if it is a very long URL-s, it can look like a spam, so avoid having more than 10 words in the URL (3 or 4 for the domain name itself and 6 or 7 for the rest of address is just fine). 0
70 IP address
This matter in a shared hosting envirement or when a site is hosted with a free hosting provider, when the IP or the whole C-class of IP addresses is blacklisted due to spamming or other illegal practices. And if its 700 sites that share the IP the possibility that one of them have been banned by the search engines a lot bigger.So take a look and see if the IP is banned. 0
71 Adsense will boost your ranking
Adsense is not related in any way to your sites SEO ranking. Google will definitely not give you a better ranking because you are hosting Adsense ads. Adsense might boost your income but this has nothing to do with your SERP (search engine rankings position).
72 Adwords will boost your ranking Similarly to Adsense
Adwords has nothing to do with your search rankings. Adwords will bring more traffic to your site but it will not affect your organic rankings in any way. 0
73 Hosting downtime
Hosting downtime can hurt you, because if a site is down all the time, it can’t be indexed. But in practice this is only a factor for you if your hosting provider is unreliable and has less than 97-98% uptime. -3
74 Dynamic URLs
Spiders prefer static URLs. You will see many dynamic pages on top positions. Long dynamic URLs (over 100 characters) are really bad and in any case you’d better use a tool to rewrite those unfriendly URLs in something more SEO-friendly. -3
75 Session IDs
This is even worse than to have dynamic URLs. Do not use session IDs for information that you’d like to be indexed by spiders. -5
76 Bans in robots.txt
If indexing of a considerable portion of the site content is banned, this is likely to affect the nonbanned part as well because spiders will come less frequently to a “noindex” site. Just use noindex on the parts that have no value for users or that can punish you for duplicate content. -5
77 Redirects (301 and 302)
When not applied properly, redirects vil hurt your site a lot – the target page might not open, or worse – a redirect can be regarded as a black hat attempt, when the visitor is taken to a different page. -10
78 Call or email Stratcog, and get your SEO plan (eg: Norwegian: Søkemotoroptimalisering) on track for the Scandinavian or Norwegian market +20
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