Important Basic SEO Practices - Part 1
June 15th, 2007
Below are some simple SEO requirements that you have to make sure of having on your site to have a better opportunity with Search Engines.
Points of attention that are currently affecting search results for indexed pages:
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Page Titles:
- Keep it short
- Keep it descriptive
- Avoid keyword stuffing
- Use separators like “-” or “|” for noise words like “and, also, or, in…” and avoid any other characters.
- And remember to keep the title tag on top of all the tags right after the <head> opening tag if possible
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Page Description:
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Page Names:
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Keywords:
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Robots tags:
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XML sitemaps:
What you need to pay attention to in regards to better page titles:
You should start taking out the “Client Name or Site Common Name” from page titles for many reasons and the most important is that Google displays the 1st 64 characters of the page title, the rest will be ignored. So keep it short and rich with the required keywords in the 1st 64 chars.
Common site name can be added after the page title if it is required to be there i.e. “Some page title text with some keywords - Site Name”
As for homepage title, this should include the Common site name plus descriptive text that will conclude the site purpose in simple smart words!
It is always better to have a different page description for each page on your site and never use 1 common description for your entire site, using this will make sure having different and directed page description rather that leaving it for search engines to pickup text from content which will not be always effective since it is highly dependable on your page content and how it is structured!
It is said that Google stopped paying attention to deprecated META tags such as Keywords and Description, but still description does matters! Again try to keep the description tag closer to the top, right below the title tag.
Make sure when you update your site content to double check the page/file name and make sure it is rich enough and understandable to humans “meaning keywords rich” and try to always keep it matching to the page title and main headline on the page. That is to make sure the URLs are more relevant to the page and could help with keywords pickup.
It is known that this tag is ignored by Google and other major search engines, but still having it on the page won’t cause any side effects and can help with other directories engines and other services that still look for these tags and use it. Just make sure the page is having relevant keywords to it’s content.
This is also important when you know how to use it and where to use it. All you need is to direct search engines on what pay attentions on your site and what exactly crawl/index. It is important as well that you don’t forget to ban spiders from certain pages that won’t give any benefit from indexing it… to avoid having crap related pages crawled/indexed from your site. Eventually the site will be rewarded for this.
Again, paying attention to this format will make it easy for search engines to index your site the way you want by giving the spider an index of your site that will better direct it to your needs. Not only because of Google sitemaps! soon this will be a standard format… So better you start getting used to it right away.
There are other factors that we can talk about but I prefer we keep attention on the above for now as “Part 1″…
At the end, Content is king and will remain the king, so if your site content is meaningful and rich you’ll get rewarded eventually, Otherwise! “No Comment” 
June 15th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
I agree with your last point. The content is the kind and will remain king. Sometime it so happens people are very good at writing article which are very much relevant for search engine point of view and contain total crap. Sometimes it works for me too
June 16th, 2007 at 2:34 am
I’m with you, That’s a thing nobody should disagree on!
what about the rest of the points? Titles and URLs are Queens in this case?
It all matters at the end in addition to many other factors. All has it’s unique charm to Search Engines i guess