Title Tags
It is one of the most important factors in achieving high search engine rankings. Having a unique title on every page of your site with the targeted keywords in it is like telling the search engine what your page is all about. Changing the title tag will have the most impact on how high you rank for the keywords you’re targeting.

• Title tags should be kept between 50 – 65 characters in length. But keep in mind, lesser is better.
• It should contain specific keyword phrases.
• Avoid stop words such as “the”, “a”, “as”, “of” if possible as they take up real estate for nothing, usually.
• Watch your keyword repetition. Some engines are now penalizing for excessive use of keywords. Adding the same thing more than five times does nothing but make your web site look like spam.

Description Meta Tag
It is the short summary of the content of the page. It basically provides a brief description to the visitor about your web page and sets their expectations.

• Avoid keyword spamming. Instead of stuffing your description tag with keywords, write in complete sentences and keep important keywords at the beginning of the description.
• Limit the number of characters to 180

2. Avoid excessive use of Flash, Javascript and AJAX

Sure, they are all fantastic technology that can enhance the user experience of your website. However, it is important to not let them get in the way of search engines’ ability to properly crawl and read your site’s content. Excessive use of frames, flash, ajax and even javascript are one of the most common mistake made by designers and developers.

2. Optimized URL Structure

Use static URL instead of Dynamic.
Dynamic URLs are most often produced by a database-driven website while static URLs are usually more descriptive and can be indexed much easier than dynamic form.

• Dynamic URL (bad): http://www.mywebsite.com/articles/items.php?id=88&32&type=45&color=67
• Static URL (good): http://www.mywebsite.com/seo.html

Notice how dynamic URLs can be actually confusing while Static URL makes more sense to people. It might cause search engines to miss possibly important information contained in the URL, and thus preventing you from getting the expected ranking.

Limit the number of directory levels
Keep your pages as close to the root domain as possible. Avoid setting up more than 3 directory levels.

Separate words using dashes (-) or undercores ( _ )
Using seperators can be read as separate words (For example: avoid “thisismyarticle”). In my opinion, hyphen looks more professional than using underscores. Although Google treats underscores the same way as hyphens, dashes are more preferable as Google “sees” each hyphened word as an individual one.

4. Proper Use of Heading tags (H1 through to H6)

For further SEO improvement, heading tags should be used wisely as it helps the search engines to understand the main focus of the page. They are given more weight by search engines than regular body copy.

• You should use < h1 > tag once for your main page title – this shows what your page is about.
• Be careful not to put too many words between H1 or H2 tags, or in link text, since it might be considered as spam

5.”Click here” is a bad linking practice

Avoid using non-descriptive link text such as “click here”, “more info” or “skip intro” for a link. Links are supposed to describe what you will find when you click the link. Using the exact same anchor text everywhere on your website can sometimes be consider as a spam too. Instead of using “click here”, it’s much more informative and relevant to say “see more about (keyword topic)”.

• Bad example: See more about SEO tips and tricks: Click Here
• Good example: Read more about SEO tips and tricks

6. Alt Attributes on Images

The ALT attribute is designed to be an alternative text description for images. Including descriptive yet brief ALT text along with your image enhance search engine rankings. In addition, including image alt attributes is also helpful to your website visitors who use Internet Explorer who have images turned off and they will be able to know what your image is.

7. Content is the king

Updating the website with producing useful content is important. Remember, concentrating on providing quality and original content regularly doesn’t only help you create the highest SEO visibility and rankings but also, your visitors build up interest in you, and enjoy seeing fresh original content on your site.

8. Building Quality Backlinks

Gaining more backlinks to your website will increase its position in search engine results. the most important factor is the number of links pointing to the website, from other websites, and the quality of those links. These links are known as backlinks.

• Focus on quality not to the quantity links. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.
• Social Bookmarking options provide options for your visitors to easily share the content of your website. Adding bookmarklet buttons, social networking icons would be helpful.
• As I’ve mentioned above, providing useful and unique content doesn’t only help your SEO visibility but also, you earn respect from your visitors. Visitors who like your content will eventually link to your site and help to spread your site.

9. A big “NO” to Splash Page

Splash pages are also known as introduction pages. It is the page that loads up before they actually get into a website; It is not only a bad idea for SEO, but also for visitors impression. It is most annoying and useless page on any website. One of the things that search engines give a lot of weight to is the content on your first landing page. They assume that you will put the most relevant and important content on your first page because that is where most people will end up.

10. Have a Site Map

Having a site map are a way of allowing search spiders about pages on your site and it’s also useful for site visitors. Google offers Google Webmaster Tools, for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that aren’t discoverable by automatically following links.

11. And lastly, pick your Canonical URL

Canonical URL is also known as preferred URL. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best URL (to present to the search engines) when there are multiple choices and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would treat the following URLS as the same:

• www.example.com
• example.com

In fact, both URLs are different. So you will need to pick the url you prefer to always use for your internal links. It can be either non-www or with www version. You can do this by doing 301 redirect.

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Removal of the WWW can help streamline pagecode which can reduce data transfer and speed up page load times – natural search blog

Since the major search engines have been handling both types of URLs relatively consistently, I think it might be useful to use the No-WWW philosophy when you work on canonicalizing your WWW/No-WWW domain names. – natural search blog

However supporting www. for news sites is pretty much pointless and has no effect on usability as you have claimed because the site is going to go to your site whether they type in www or not so usability is a non-issue.

To start with, the http://yoursite.com is the true domain. The www version is technically a subdomain. From that perspective you should use the http://yoursite.com version. But…The use of www has dominated so successfully that it has become branded in our minds as the “proper” and perhaps, to many, the only prefix for a domain name. From a usability standpoint then this is probably the better choice despite adding four unnecessary characters to every one of your URLs. Trinity Sem

www and non www are both widely used. I feel that using www is important because most people know to put www before a domain name.

I sometimes think it’d be easier to drop the www. but to be honest people are likely to type it anyway.

The “www” subdomain is superfluous and unnecessary baggage on many URLs. Requests to a www subdomain should still work, but simply redirect to the main domain name and serve the appropriate content.

Why it matters?

• Search engines treat them to be different sites. Searchers only want to see one version in results. And site owners worry that if search engines find multiple versions of a page, their link credit will be diluted and they’ll lose ranking.

• Url canonicalization or picking preferred URL will also help increase your search engine rankings because search engine crawlers try to index and display the original or “canonical” version.

Which version is better to use?

If you are starting your site yet, both version should be fine as long as you pick either one of them. Chose what one you want to use and redirect the other.

For older sites, the best method is to do some SEO investigation and find out which version of the domain has the most backlinks and PageRank. Use the Google Toolbar, read the page rank bar for each version, and go with the one that shows more green.

When you are finish deciding which you one to use..

• Make sure you do you redirect the other URL to your preferred URL. You can do it by using 301 redirects.
• Change all your site links to your preferred URL.
• Tell your preferred domain to Google by using their webmaster’s tool

More Links

• SEO advice Canolization: for very informative post about canonicalization, www vs. non-www, redirects, duplicate urls, 302 “hijacking,” etc.
• Canonical URL tag: The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps

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