Gasta.co.uk: 2011

Factors that improve search engine results:

Brandt Dainow is an independent web analyst with companies throughout the English-speaking world, and in the EU.

Code

1) Search terms in the <TITLE> tag
2) Search terms in <B> or <STRONG>
3) Search term in anchor text in links to a page
4) Search term in image names
5) Search term in image ALTs
6) Search terms the first or last words of the Title Tag
7) Search terms in the page name URL (e.g. acme.co.uk/folder/searchterm.html)
8) Use of hyphen ("-") or underscore ("_") in search terms in URL (for example, search-term.htm is better than searchterm.htm)
9) Search terms in the page folder URL (e.g. acme.co.uk/search-term/page.html)
10) Search terms in the first or last words in the H1 Tag
11) Search terms in other <H> tags
12) Search terms in the page's query parameters (e.g. acme.co.uk/page.html?searchterm)
13) Search terms (and location) in the meta-description tag
14) XML sitemap
15) XML sitemap under 10k
16) Accuracy of XML sitemap
17) Sitemap folder geo-targeting
18) Index/follow meta tags
19) Robots.txt present
20) URL length
21) Title attribute of link
22) W3C-compliant html coding
23) Video header and descriptions
24) Video sitemap
25) Compression for size by eliminating white space, using shorthand notation, and combining multiple CSS files where appropriate. GZIP can be used
26) Use CSS sprites to help consolidate decorative images
27) No redirection to other URLS in the same server
28) <NOSCRIPT> tags (even though I don't know anyone who doesn't have JavaScript enabled)
29) Geo-meta tags if the business serves a targeted geographic area
30) Relevance of <TITLE> tag to page content
31) Relevance of <META DESCRIPTION> to page content
32) Code-to-text ratio
33) Canonical URL
34) Directory depth
35) Number of query-string parameters
36) Link attributes -- like rel=nofollow
37) Link structure
38) Microformats
39) Mobile accessibility
40) Page size
41) Page accessible
42) Page internal popularity (how many internal links it has)
43) ALT Image Meta Tags (this can be helpful for FLASH elements too)
44) Age of prominent / 2nd level pages

Copy

45) The most important rule of all: plain old simple quality relevant content
46) Keyword density
47) Keyword proximity -- number of words between search terms (less is better)
48) Keyword positions in page
49) Keyword prominence (start/end of paragraphs or sentences)
50) Words in page
51) Page category (or theme)
52) Relevance (to searched phrase)
53) Synonyms to query terms
54) Language
55) Linear distribution of search terms
56) Legality of content
57) Frequency of updates
58) Standard deviation of search terms in the population of pages containing search terms
59) Semantic relevance (synonym for matching term)
60) Rich snippets
61) Rich snippet UGC rating
62) Search term density through body copy (about 3-5 percent)
63) Search terms in internal link anchor text on the page
64) Search terms in external link anchor text on the page
65) Search terms in the first 50-100 words in HTML on the page

125) Lack of designed 404 page
126) Number of links a page is from homepage
127) Server calls, images, JavaScript, database calls (affects speed of website)
128) Badly done redirects
129) Duplicate title/keywords
130) Redirect through refresh meta tags
131) Dynamic pages
132) Links with "?" in them
133) Use of frames
134) Use of cookies
135) Excessive cross linking
136) Cloaking
137) Excessive use of graphics
138) JavaScript navigation (Googlebot can't run JavaScript)
139) Comment spamming
140) Use of display none within CSS
141) Use of -9999px within CSS
142) Use of absolute positioning
143) Use of tables
144) Use of the <blink>tag
145) Slow site architecture. If your site build is in such a manner that the robots can't crawl it without losing too much time, some pages won't get indexed
146) Deep site architecture. The further down a page is, the less chance it will get found. If it is found, it will be visited less often
147) Duplicate tags on site
148) Number of links on page (too many will affect adversely)
149) Page file size/load time

Copy

150) Hidden content or font colors within 10 percent of background color RBG value
151) Poison words
152) Keyword stuffing
153) Doorway pages
154) Keyword saturation
155) Use of words relating to porn
156) Saying anything remotely negative about Google
157) Duplicate content on site. Google is "understanding" about ecommerce sites that have duplicate content for multiple products -- it will pick one at random and dump the rest, but you won't be penalized

Site

158) Over-optimization. If you match what Google is looking for too well, Google will assume you did it just to get better listings and you'll be penalized. Google considers tuning your site for better listings unethical
159) Linking between all the domains hosted on same IP
160) Multiple redirects
161) Multiple domains to the same website (different country variations are acceptable, but not multiple totally different domains, for example newcars.com, sportscars.com, and fastcars.com pointing at the same site)
162) IP address (many are blacklisted for spamming)
163) Whether the site has been previously de-indexed due to malpractice
164) Domain IP neighbors (if they have a bad reputation)

Links

165) Participation in link schemes
166) Link to a bad neighborhood
167) Traffic buying
168) Link buying
169) Being linked to by a site Google dislikes (you'll be punished by association)

Behavior

170) Automatically playing audio or video
171) Unsecured payment gateways
172) Percentage of SERP click-throughs that return to SERP page in a short time (sort of bounce rate)
173) Google staff finds your site doesn't match what is in the Google cache

Brandt Dainow is an independent web analyst with companies throughout the English-speaking world, and in the EU.

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http://www.gasta.com Factors that improve search engine results: