1. Up-time - This is one of the most important parts of your sites page ranking, if your site isn’t up then it isn’t on the web, if it isn’t on the web then you can’t get hits so invest some time into researching for a reliable host!
2. Simplicity - To gain a high search engine ranking simplicity is key, keep pages low on images and fast loading. As long as your site is appealing to the eye visitors won’t care if it has the latest fandango flash effects. All they want is the product!
3. The Domain Name - Your domain name should be easy to remember, spell and say! When someone types in STCFX on Google for example Google will more than likely show stcfx.com and other extensions before other domains. If your site is about cars then name it something like hot-cars.com!
4. Keep directory’s simple - When spidering sites search engines don’t want to be going more than three directories deep for content, they want things nearest to the root as possible, keep things organised but not too organised!
5. Directories and file names - They should contain keywords about their content, if your site is about retro cars, then name your document something like retro-cars.html
6. Small sites - Keep the size of your sites small, the smaller they are the better, makes search engines life a hell of a lot easier and for the poor people on 56k modems it brightens their day!
7. Static URL’s - Search engines like static URL’s such as http://www.stcfx.com/some-content.html than having to crawl dynamic links such as http://www.stcfx.com/find.php?some=content . Search engines will crawl dynamic links but you are likely to rank higher with static URL’s.
8. Hyphens - They are your friend, most search engines parse a hyphen as a space, and for example lots-of-content would appear to them as lots of content. But if you use an underscore it would appear as lotsofcontent which do you prefer!
9. Navigation - How do you expect visitors to visit the other pages on your site without a navigation bar! There needs to be one on every page with at least one link to the all important home page!
10. Sitemaps - Include sitemaps, it’s a search engines dream to have one page with links to all major parts of your sites! Include the link on at least the homepage and name it something like sitemap.html or site-map.html.
11. META Descriptions - Whoever said they were dead! Sure they don’t help much with your ranking but some search engines use the content to show under your sites title, so make sure to include a rich, descriptive sentence! Make it no more than 150 words.
12. Title Tag - This can be a very short overview or your site or just the title. It’s recommended you have no more than 7-10 words.
13. META Keywords - Now these are really dead, but using these will help you remember what keywords you were targeting when you come back to it, try to keep no more than 20 keywords and use spaces not commas!
14. Robot META Tags - Ok this isn’t essential but it helps keep search engines out of private things. Use this guide to help you Robots META Tag .
15. Heading Tags - These are the things such as <h1>, <h2> all the way to <h6>, you should use them in the right order and if they are too big use css to resize them. Also keep in mind that search engines prefer <h1> for example, then text and graphics and the next header.
16. Title Attribute - This should be used primarily on links, with a brief description of where the link will take you, such as “<a href=”page.html” title=”This page contains links to other pages.”>” This will improve accessibility/usability.
17. Alt Tag - Every image should have this tag; it should basically be a rich description of what the image depicts. This is also another accessibility/usability tool.
18. Content - Your site should definitely have more text than code! Content is key so keep the code down and the text up!
19. Anchor Text - This is the text used to link a page, this will increase SERP performance greatly if used!
20. Text Links - Search engines can’t read images so use text links wherever you can, image links are a no no. If you must use them make sure you use the alt text tag.
21. Content Galore - In my opinion the best way for better search engine ranking is content. Lots and lots of original content will greatly improve your sites ranking!
22. Constant Updates - Sites that are constantly updated will give search engines a reason to come back time and time again, so make it a constantly updating, developing site!
23. Build it first! - Don’t have a construction page, then slowly upload bit by bit of your site, build it and upload it is the best way to get in a search engines good books!
24. Use a robots.txt file - Only a few search engines at the moment use this, but many are starting to look for it. This basically tells the crawler what not and what to look in, more details can be found here robots.txt .
25. Validation - Stick to the rules for better rankings! Adhere to the W3C standards and you can’t go wrong, the code will work on all browsers and search engines will be more likely to take your code seriously.
26. Analyze Traffic - Make sure you know what traffic your getting and where from. Analyze log files, this will help you optimize your sites more!
27. NO Frames - Frames are bad! real bad!
28. Link Popularity - The more inbound relative links your website has the better its search engine ranking. Look for link exchanges!
29. NO Broken Links - Why link to something that’s not there, really what is the point!
30. NO Tricks - If it doesn’t help the user, don’t have it!

About The Author

Written by MissDanni
MissDanni is a jill of all trades, from web design to web promotion and everything in between, you might just say web everything. Working in the web industry since 2000 she continues to learn new things everyday. "Nothing is impossible if you are willing to take the time to learn and make mistakes."

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