What is the Google Dance?
Whenever we are at trade shows, run seminars, or speak at symposiums we get asked the question "what is the Google dance?" We've heard a few different things referred to as "the Google Dance", but only one is really correct. It's the period when Google is rebuilding its rankings,During the month, Google sends out robots (spiders) to crawl the web and archive every website it finds and results fluctuate widely for a 3 to 5 day period.
How Often Does The Google Dance Happen?
The name "Google Dance" was in the past used to describe the period that a major index update of the Google search engine are being implemented. These major Google index update occured on average every 36 days or 10 times per year. It was easiest be identified by significant changes in search results, and by an updating of Google's cache of all indexed pages. These changes would be evident from one minute to the next. But the update did not proceed as a switch from one index to another like the flip of a switch. In fact, it took several days to finish the complete update of the index.
Because Google, like every other search engine, depends on their customers knowing that they deliver authoritative reliable results 24 hours of the day, seven days a week, updates pose a serious issue. They can not shut down for maintenance and they cannot afford to go offline for even one minute. Hence, we had the Dance. Every search engine goes through it, some more or less often than Google. However, it is only because of Google's reach that we pay attention to its rebuild more than that of any other engine.
Since August 2003, the famous / infamous Google Dance is no more. Or rather it has become less dramatic. Google now performs updates every week, with most movement occuring on Mondays. These ongoing updates feature mostly minor algorithm and index updates.
So, during any month there will be minor changes in rankings. This is because Google's bot or spider is always running and finding new material. It also happens because the bot may have detected that a website no longer exists, and needs to be deleted from the index. During the Dance, the Googlebot will revisit every website, figure out how many sites link to it, and how many it links out to, and how valuable these links are.
Because Google is constantly crawling and updated selected pages, their search results will vary slightly over the course of the month. However, it is only during the Google Dance that these results can swing wildly. You also need to consider that Google has multiple data centers, sharing more than 10,000 servers. Somehow, the updates to the index that occur during the month, and outside of the Google Dance have to get transferred throughout. It's a constant process for Google, and every other search engine. These ongoing, incremental updates only affect parts of the index at any one time.
Checking The Google Dance
Until January 2004, Google had 12 main www servers online, which were as follows:
* www-ex.google.com - (where you get when you type www.google.com)
* www-sj.google.com - (which can also be accessed at www2.google.com)
* www-va.google.com - (which can also be accessed at www3.google.com)
* www-dc.google.com
* www-ab.google.com
* www-in.google.com
* www-zu.google.com
* www-cw.google.com
* www-fi.google.com - found in May 2003.
* www-gv.google.com - found in August 2003.
* www-gv2.google.com - found in September 2003.
* www-kr.google.com - found in October 2003.
At some point in January, these servers stopped accepting connections, and the only servers easy to connect to were:
* www.google.com
* www2.google.com
* www3.google.com
As well as the numeric address databases - which people keep discovering, and kindly help us keep abreast of.
* 216.239.37.99
* 216.239.39.99
* 216.239.41.99
* 216.239.51.99
* 216.239.37.104
* 216.239.41.104
* 216.239.37.147
* 64.233.161.98
* 64.233.161.99
* 64.233.161.104
* 64.233.161.105
At any time during an index update you can check the Google servers, and they will display sometime wildly differing results, thus they are said to be "dancing", and hence the name "Google Dance".
In the past, the easiest way to check if the Google Dance was happening was to go to www.google.com, and do a search. Look at the blue bar at the top of the page. It would have the words "Results 1 - 10 of about 626,000. Search took 0.48 seconds" Then check the same search on www2.google.com, and www3.google.com. If you were seeing a different number of total pages for the same search, then the Google Dance was on. You could also check all the variations above. www2 is really www-sj, and www3 is www-va. We have found that all the others need their full www-extension.google.com in the url if you want to test them properly. Once the numbers, and the order of results on all 10 www's are the same, you knew the dance is over.
Importance Of The Google Dance
For most people, this event in and of itself was not important. However for anyone in the search engine optimization industry it was a period of note. Pages got temporarily dropped. Sometimes it lasted a day. People panicked. Then they are re-added, and they are better placed than before, and things calmed down. It's interesting to see how overpoweringly important this one engine is. For more information on about this search engine, or any other
1. Introduction
One of the buzz-words of the latest 10 years in internet marketing is SEO. Everyone talks about SEO, everyone tries to apply it more or less successfully. If you are experienced in this theme you may skip the first chapters, otherwise read along to learn the very basics.
1.1. What is SEO
The term "SEO" is the abbreviation to "Search Engine Optimization". This is not about optimizing search engines, though. It is about optimizing websites for search engines. But why one needs to optimize a website? To answer this question we need to understand what a search engine is.
Search engines as the way to find an info on the web appeared in the middle of 90's. They crawled websites and indexed them in their own databases marking them as having one or another keyword in its content. Thus, when someone put some query in the searchbox of that search engine, it quickly searched its database and found which indexed pages corresponded to that query.
So, the more keywords of a query a website had, the higher it was shown in the results of a search. We don't know who was the first guy realized that he can make some changes to the pages of his website to make it rank higher, but he was truly a diamond!
So, SEO is something that helps your site rank better in search engines. There are a number of ways and methods of SEO, some of them are legitimate, while others are restricted and considered as "blackhat" techniques. Search engines don't like blackhat SEO and the effect of its usage may be disastrous for your website. Anyways, we'll thoroughly cover this material later in this SEO FAQ.
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1.2. Do I need SEO?
Well, the answer "Yes" is the first thing that comes to mind, does it? But let's think a bit more. Does SEO help... well.. umm.. say some oil-extracting company to sell their product? Does it help to promote a small local grocery in the neighbourhood of your home owned by an old chinese? Does it help Obama to rule his bureaucrats? Well, I guess you've got the idea. SEO is effective mostly for Internet businesses. Do you have one? Then you need SEO. Otherwise, SEO is only one of the possible channels to spread the word out about your product or service. And not necessarily the best one.
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1.3. Should I hire someone or make it all myself?
One of the most frequent unspoken questions is: should I hire a SEO professional or save few bucks and do it myself? There is no one universal answer for all situations, so here are some pros and cons:
Pros Cons
Hired SEO
1. You don't have to waste your time;
2. You don't have to learn SEO yourself;
3. SEO Pro's can be quite effective.
1. You still need to control a hired SEO yourself;
2. SEOs usually don't give any guarantees and actually you must be very cautious while choosing a SEO to hire;
3. Hired guy may be a SEO professional, but he is not necessarily a proffesional in your theme;
4. Finally, you have to pay this guy.
Do it yourself
1. If you want it done right - do it yourself. You are the one who performs all the show, so you know best what is right and what is wrong about it;
2. You really saving some bucks out there;
3. You can constantly monitor the trends and apply changes in your SEO strategy on the fly.
1. You will need to spend some time reading SEO FAQs and tutorials like this one, posting stupid questions on forums and doing other things nubies always do. It doesn't kill, but still takes some time;
2. You can get very little SEO benefits for all of your efforts and time spent. After all, you are not a guru, right?
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2. Basic concepts
2.1. Search engines
Before we start talking about search engine optimization we need to understand how search engines work. Basically, each search engine consists of 3 parts:
1. The Crawler (or the spider). This part of a search engine is a simple robot that downloads pages of a website and crawls them for links. Then, it opens and downloads each of those links to crawl (spider) them too. The crawler visits websites periodically to find the changes in their content and modify their rankings accordingly. Depending on the quality of a website and the frequency of its content updates this may happen from say once per month up to several times a day for a high popularity news sites.
The crawler does not rank websites itself. Instead, it simply passes all crawled websites to another search engine module called the indexer.
2. The Indexer. This module stores all the pages crawled by the spider in a large database called the index. Think of it as the index in a paper book: you find a word and see which pages mention this word. The index is not static, it updates every time the crawler finds a new page or re-crawls the one already presented in the index. Since the volume of the index is very large it often takes time to commit all the changes into the database. So one may say that a website has been crawled, but not yet indexed.
Once the website with all its content is added to the index, the third part of the search engine begins to work.
3. The ranker (or search engine software). This part interacts with user and asks for a search query. Then it sifts millions of indexed pages and finds all of them that are relevant to that query. The results get sorted by relevance and finally are shown to a user.
What is relevance and how would one determine if a page is more or less relevant to a query? Here comes the tricky part - the ranking factors...
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2.2. Terminology
Here are the basic terms you need to know. All others will be explained along the way.
Anchor text
This is simply a text of a link. Let suppose you have a link like that:
a href="seo-faq-tutorial.htm"The essentials of SEO - a complete guidea>
The link would be looking as follows:
The essentials of SEO - a complete guide
The text "The essentials of SEO - a complete guide" - is the anchor text in this case. The anchor text is the key parameter in a link building strategy. You should always make sure that the anchor text of a link meets the theme of that page. If your page is about dogs, do not link to it with the "cats" anchor text. Obviously, you cannot control all and every link on the web, but at least you should make all links within your own website have an appropriate anchor text.
Inbound link
...or backlink is a link that points to your site. The more you have - the better. But in particular there are many exclusions from this rule, so read the Off-Page optimization section to learn more.
Keyword
One or more words describing the theme of a website or page. In fact, we should distinguish keyWORDS and keyPHRASES, but in SEO practice they all called keywords. For instance, the keywords for this page are: SEO FAQ, SEO tutorial, etc.
Short-tail and long-tail keywords
Easy one. Short-tail keywords are some general, common words and phrases like "rent a car", "seo", "buy a toy", "personal loan" and so on. Long-tail on the opposite precisely describe a theme: "rent bmw new york", "seo in florida", "buy a plush teddy bear" etc. The more precise a keyword is, the less it is popular, the less people type this exact query in the search box. But! The other side of the coin is: since each query is highly targeted, then once a visitor comes to your website from a search engine query and finds what he is looking for - it is very likely that such visitor will soon become a customer. This part is very important! Long-tail queries are not very popular, but the conversion rate for such queries is much much greater than for short-tail ones.
SERPs
You may heard this term, but didn't understand what is it. SERP means "Search Engine Result Page". If a user types some query and hit Enter he is redirected then to a SERP. Then he can click one of the results to open that website. Obviously, the results shown in the first positions get much more visitors than the ones from page #2-3 and lower. This is the purpose of SEO, actually: make a website move higher in SERPs.
Snippet
This is a short description shown by a search engine in the SERP listings. The snippet is often taken from a Meta Description tag, or it can be created by a search engine automatically basing on the content of a page.
Landing page
Landing page is a page opened when a visitor comes to the site clicking to a SERP. Here is an example query:
Free Monitor for Google
In this case, the page www.cleverstat.com/en/google-monitor-query.htm is a landing page for the "google monitor" query.
Link juice
This funny term means the value that passes from one page to another by means of a link between them. To be precise: the linked page (acceptor) gets a link juice from the linking page (donor). The more link juice flows into a page, the higher it is ranked. Let's imagine a page that is worth $10 - this is the value of that page. If a page has 2 links, each one costs $5 then - that is the amount of link juice passed to the linked page. If the first page has 5 links, then each one only passes $2 of the initial link juice. Here is a simple picture to illustrate this concept:
Link juice explanation. $5 value links.
Each link passes $5 value
Link juice explanation. $2 value links.
Each link passes only $2 value
This means, the more links a Page A has, the less value each linked Page B gains from that Page A. Obviously, the real link juice value is not measured in dollars.
Nofollow links
Nofollow link is a link that a search engine should not follow. To make a link nofollow you need the below code:
Some anchor text
Google does not follow nofollow links and does not transfer the link juice across such links. You can read more about nofollow links here.
Link popularity
This term designates the amount of inbound links pointing to a site. Popular sites have more links. However, the number of inbound links is only a half of a pie. Read the off-page optimization section below to learn more.
Keyword stuffing
When you put a long list of keywords in a tag - this is keyword stuffing. For instance, a title tag for this page could look like: TITLE>SEO guide, SEO FAQ, SEO tutorial, best seo faq, seo techniques, seo strategy guide/TITLE> and so on. This would be the keyword stuffing. Instead, the current title of this page (the one you're reading now) looks quite natural and adequately describes its contents. Do not use the keyword stuffing as a) it does not work; b) it is a bad practice that can hurt your rankings.
Robots.txt
robots.txt is a file intended to tell search engine spiders whether or not they are allowed to crawl the content of the site. It is a simple txt file placed in the root folder of your website. Here are some examples:
This one blocks the entire site for GoogleBot:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
This one blocks all files withing a single folder except myfile.html for all crawlers:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder1/
Allow: /folder1/myfile.html
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3. Ranking factors
In general, there are only two groups of them: on-page and off-page ranking factors. It's been argued which one is the most important, but we'll answer that question later in this FAQ. At this time you should understand that both are crucial and both need the proper attention.
3.1. On-Page ranking factors
There are many on-page ranking factors and even more has been spoken of since the first days of SEO. Some of them are really important, while others are said to be crucial for SEO, but actually are useless or even hurt your rankings. You know, search engines are evolving, they change their algos, and something that used to work in 2003 now has become a piece of useless garbage. So, here is the list of on-page ranking factors sorted by their importance and SEO value.
3.1.1. Important stuff
1. Title
This one seems to be one the most important on-page factors. You should pay a close attention to the title tag. Here are some tips on writing a good title:
a) Keep it precise and short enough. There is a popular myth saying that the title tag must be short, because Google (and others too) does not read it past first 60-70 symbols. That's not true (the proof link). Google will read nearly all that you offer to it in your title tag, but the weight of each keyword in the title would be much less in that case. It seems that only first 10-12 words get the benefit from being in the title, so keep it short. Also, a long and spammy title tag is hard to read by human visitors.
b) Do not stuff it with keywords, instead write in a normal human-oriented style. Instead of "Big gadgets, small gadgets, cheap gadgets, gadgets for sale" use more natural "Cheap gadgets of all sizes for sale". Hope you got the idea.
c) Use a unique title for each page of your website. Each title should accurately reflect the contents of the entitled page. Do not use the same title all over the website.
d) Make your title eye-catching! It is title that a visitor first see when screening the results of a search. It is the first step towards the sale - don't ignore it.
2. Content
The next important factor is the content of a page which seems pretty naive at the first glance, right? Wrong! Content is the king, as SEOs like to repeat. The quality content not only describes your product or service, it also converts your visitors to your customers and customers to returning customers. The quality content increases your ranking in search engines as they like a quality content. Moreover, the quality content even helps you get more inbound links to your website (see off-page ranking factors below)!
Basic tips for content are:
a) Write for humans, not for search engines! Remember: you offer you products for humans. It is human who reads the texts on your website and decides whether or not he is going to purchase the stuff from you. Yeah, technically speaking, search engines read your site too, but I never heard of a search engine that would buy something.
So you should create a content that is interesting and useful for your human visitors at the first place!
b) Suggest something valuable. A text merely describing your product is dull and useless. I don't want to know what features a product has. I want to know what is in it for me! Consider that when preparing the content of your website.
c) Share your experience. Write of something that is interesting to you. Share your experience. Offer some articles or reviews of related products or services (do not borrow them from article sites though - write your own instead). You know - content is the king - so if your site is interesting to your visitors they will link to it on their own.
d) The first 3 wasn't too SEOish, right? Here is a bit more technical one: keep the text on a page within one theme. Search engines are more about themes now, rather than about keywords as they used to be. So you should think the same way: in terms of themes, not keywords. For each page of your site choose ONE theme related to your business and fill that page with the content relevant to that theme. Focusing your efforts within one-theme-per-page strategy makes it much easier to create landing pages for long-tail queries and also make the whole website more structurized and easy to read.
3. Navigation and internal linking
Again an important ranking factor. It seems obvious to create a proper navigation so the search engine crawler could follow all the links on a website and indexed all of its pages then. However, this factor is still being highly underestimated. Creating a clear and easy plain-text navigation helps both search engines and human visitors.
Avoid using JavaScript or Flash links since they are hard to read by search engines. Always provide an alternative way to open any page at your website with simple text links. Do have a sitemap of your website available from any other page with one click.
Also keep in mind that quality internal linking spreads the link juice across the pages of your website, and this strongly helps your landing pages rank better in SERP for long-tail keywords. Use this wisely, though. Link only to pages that really need to be linked to.
Let's suppose you have two pages: one generates you $10 income for every visitor, while other one does only $0.1. Which one whould you link first? Think of it that way and link to the most important and valuable pages of your website, using a relevant anchor text for each link.
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3.1.2. Helpful stuff
The below factors and techniques are not as crucial as the ones described above, but still they help a bit in gaining a higher rank in SERPs.
1. Headings
Once upon a time search engines paid a close attention to the heading tags (H1 through H6), but now those days are gone. Heading tags are easily manipulated, so their value is not very high nowadays. Nevertheless, you still want to use headings to mark the beginning of a text, to split an article into parts, to organize sections and sub-sections within your document. In other words, despite headers provide merely a small SEO value, they are still crucial for making your texts easiliy readable by human visitors.
Use the H1 tag for the main heading of the page, then the H2 for the article headings and the H3 to split the different parts of an article with sub-headers. That would be pretty good practice and is enough to make your site readable by humans. It also adds some SEO points which you should not neglect too.
2. Bold/Strong and Italic/Emphasized text
Both are nearly useless, but still have some SEO value (very little though). As with headers, you better use them for the benefit of your human visitors, emphasizing the key parts of the text. But do not put every 5th keyword in a bold text as it looks ugly while not giving any significant boost to your rankings anyway. Moreover, such page would be very hard to read.
3. Keyword placement
The value of keywords in a text depends on their placement across the page. Keywords placed near the top of the document get higher value than ones residing near the bottom. Important: when I say top or bottom I mean the source of the HTML document, not its visual appearance. That is why you want to put your navigation and supplemental texts near the bottom of the source file and all important and relevant content - near the top.
This rule also works in more specific cases: keywords placed in the beginning of the title tag are more important than ones placed 4th or 5th. Keywords placed in the beginning of the anchor text are more important and get more value too.
4. Keywords in filenames and domain name
An old trick with putting your target keywords into a filename or having them in a domain name. Still works, but don't expect too much boost from this one.
a) Keywords in a domain name do help a little, but it is much better to have a short, easy to remember domain name than something like www.all-of-my-target-keywords-i-so-much-want-to-rank-for.com
b) Keywords in a file or a folder name also help a bit and since you still want to name your documents, why not give them appropriate names? Though as I said before, do not expect any significant ranking boost. For a competitive query it won't help you much anyway. Also, if your page is written in other language than default English (or some other european language), it won't help you at all.
5. Image Alt attribute
This one was very popular in 2003, but now keyword stuffing of the Alt attribute does not give any SEO value to a page. The better use of the Alt attribute would be something like this: 
Write a natural description for each image and make sure it reads well. This helps you in two ways: a) your site ranks better in the image search; b) Google often takes the Alt text to create a snippet for the SERP.
6. Meta Description
One of the most popular and steady myths (alongside with keyword density) is the Meta Description tag. They say it helps you rank better. They say it is crucial to have it filled with the apropriate description of a page content. They say you must have it on each page of your website. All of these is not true. Nowadays, the only way the Meta Description is used by search engines is taking its content to create a snippet for the SERP. That is all! You don't get any other benefits of using the Meta D on your page, neither do you fall upon any penalty for not using it.
There is an opposite opinion suggesting not to use the Meta D at all, since a search engine anyway creates a snippet basing on the content of a page and you can't make this work better than a search engine. So why waste your time doing that? Personally, I would not agree with this point, since according to Google guidelines the Meta Description tag is still the preferred source of the info for a snippet. Though it is up to you decide whether you want it on your page or not, since as stated above it doesn't give any additional SEO impact, neither positive, nor negative.
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3.1.3. Useless stuff (no pain, but no gain as well)
1. Meta Keywords
Long time ago the meta name="keywords" content=""> tag was intended to tell search engine the keywords relevant to this particular page. In modern SEO history search engines download websites and extract relevant keywords from their content, so the Meta K tag is not used for web ranking anymore. Simply forget it, it is useless for SEO.
2. Keyword Density
One of the most overestimated web ranking factors is the keyword density. What is keyword density and why this myth lives so long? The keyword density of each particular word on a page is calculated as follows:
KD = Word_Count / Total_Words * 100%
That is, if a page has 150 words and the word "SEO" is mentioned 24 times on that page, its keyword density would be: 24 / 150 * 100% = 16%
But why this value is useless? Because search engines has evolved and does not count on keyword density anymore, since it is very easily manipulated. There are thousands of factors that search engines consider when calculating the page rank, so why would they need such simple (not to say primitive) way to rank pages as to count the number of times a word appears in the page text? You may hear the keyword density of 6% is the best rate, or keep it within 7% to 10%, or search engines like kw density within 3% to 7% and other bullshit. The truth is...
Search engines like pages written in a natural language. Write for humans, not for search engines! A page can have any keyword density from 0% (no keyword on a page at all) to 100% (a page consisting of only one word) and still rank high.
Well, of course you may want to control the keyword density of your pages, but please consider that there is no good value for this factor. Any value will work if your text is written with a human reader in mind. Why would one still want to check for keyword density if it is not count any more? Because it is a quick and dirty way to estimate the theme of a page. Simply do not overestimate this thing, it is merely a number, nothing more and it is useless for SEO.
Another interesting question: why this myth is still alive and why there are so many people still talking about keyword desnity as an important ranking factor? Perhaps, because keyword density is easy to understand and modify if needed. You can see it right here with your naked eye and quickly learn if your site is going good or bad. Well, it only seems as that, but not actually is - keyword density is useless, remember?
3. Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs
Beleive me or not, there is no difference. Both are of the same SEO value. The days when search engines had difficulties indexing dynamic URL websites are gone for good.
4. www.site.com vs. site.com
No difference either. If you want your site to be accessed with both ways, please add something like this into your .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
5. Underscore vs. hyphen in URLs
Once again, there is no any difference from the SEO point. You can use underscore, or hyphen, or even don't use any separator at all - this neither helps, nor hurts your position in SERPs.
6. Subfolders
Is it better to have a /red-small-cheap-widget.php file rather than /widgets/red/small/cheap/index.php? Does it hurt your rank if you put the content deep into the subfolders? The answer is no, it won't hurt your rankings and actually it doesn't matter at all how deep in the folder tree a file is located. What matters is how many clicks it takes to reach that file from the homepage.
If you can reach that file in one click - it certainly is more important and would have more weight than say some other file located within 5 clicks away from the index page. The homepage usually has many link juice to share, so the pages it directly links to are obviously more important than others (well, since they receive more link juice, that is).
7. W3C validation
W3C is World Wide Web Consortium - an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. Basically speaking, they are guys who invented HTML, CSS, SOAP, XML and other web technologies.
Validation is the process of checking a page or website for its compliance with W3C standards. You can run a validation of any website for free here. Note, this validator shows not only such trivial things like unclosed quotation, undefined tags or wrong attribute values. It also checks the encoding problems, the compliance with the specified DOCTYPE, obsolete tags and attributes and many more.
Why is validation needed? A 100% valid website ensures that it will display correctly (and identically!) in all browsers that support standards. Unfortunately, in real life some browsers do not strictly follow the W3C standards, so a variety of different cross-browser problems with the number of websites are not rare thing all over the web. This doesn't belittles the importance of W3C standards, however.
From the SEO point the validation doesn't look so crucial though. Run a validation through google.com and you'll see a bunch of warnings and errors on their website. This example pretty clearly shows that Google doesn't care of W3C validation itself. At least not as much to give a strong rank boost to valid websites or penalize erroneous ones. It simply doesn't care. The recommended W3C validation strategy is: perform it to make your site working and accessible with all common browsers and don't bother doing it for the SEO purposes only, if you don't experience any cross-browser issues - it works fine as it is.
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3.1.4. Stuff that hurts your rankings
1. Keyword stuffing
Google defines that term pretty clear. Once again: write for humans. Repeating keywords across the page can trigger Google spam filter and this will result in huge loss of positions if not total ban of your website. Write naturally, optimize a bit if needed - that's the best way of using keywords nowadays.
2. Hidden text / Invisible links
At first, let's see what Google says about hidden text. Obviously, Google doesn't like it and if your site uses such technique it may be excluded from Google's index. You may ask, how would Google know if I use hidden text or not? Ok, I can set "display:none" in my external CSS file and limit the access to that CSS file with my robots.txt. Will Google be able to learn that a page has a hidden text then? Yes and no. This might work in the short term, but in the long run your disguise will fail, sooner or later. Also, it's been reported that GoogleBot not always strictly follows the robots.txt instructions, so it actually can read and parse JS and CSS without any problems and once it does - the consequences for your website and its web rankings will be disastrous.
3. Doorway pages
As bad as some SEO method could ever be. The doorway pages are special landing pages created for the only sake of obtaining good positions for some particular keyword. It doesn't have any valuable content and its only purpose is to catch the visitor from the SERP and redirect him to some other, non-doorway page which by the way is usually absolutely irrelevant to the initial visitor's query.
4. Splogs
Splogs (derivative from Spam Blogs) is the modern version of the old-evil doorways. The technique was as follows: one created thousands of blogs on some free blog service like blogspot.com, linked them between each other and obtained some backlinks via the blog comment spam and other blackhat methods (see below). Splogs itself did not contain any unique information, their content was always automatically generated articles stuffed with keywords, however due to a large number of inbound links such splogs ranked very well in SERPs dislodging many legitimate blogs. Later, Google implemented some filters to protect itself from the large amount of splogs and now any splog gets banned pretty fast.
If you own a blog - do not make it spammy. Instead focus your attention on writing good and interesting content. This works better in fact.
5. Cloaking
Not as bad in some particular cases, but still a blackhat technique. The method is based on determining whether a visitor is a human or search engine spider and then deciding which content to show. Humans then get one variant of the website while search engines get another one, stuffed with keywords.
6. Duplicate content
Being a scarecrow for many webmasters, duplicate content is not actually as dangerous as it is spoken. There are two types of content that can be called duplicate. The first case is when a website has several different ways to access the same page, for instance:
http://www.somesite.com/
http://somesite.com/
http://somesite.com/index.php
http://www.somesite.com.index.php?sessionid=4567
etc.
All four refer to the same page, but actually are treated as different pages having the same content. This type of duplicate content issue is easiliy resolved by Google itself and does not lead to any penalty from Google.
The other type is duplicate content on different domain names. A content of a website is considered duplicate if it doesn't add any value to the original content. That is if you simply copy-paste an article to your site - it is a duplicate content. If you copy-paste an article and add some comments or review it from your point of view - that's not duplicate content. The key feature here is some added value. If a site adds value to the initial information - it is not duplicate.
There are two other moments here that are worth to be mentioned. First, if someone copies your text and posts it then on another site - it is very unlikely that you will be penalized for that. Google tracks the age of each page and tends to consider the older one - and it is your website in this case - as the source of the original text. Second, you still can borrow the materials from other websites without a significant risk of being penalized for duplicate content by simply re-writing the text with your own words. There is a way to produce unique random texts using Markov chains, synonymizers and other methods, but I would not recommend using them, since the output looks too spammy and is not natural anyway, so it really can hurt your Google position. Write for humans. Write by yourself.
7. Frames
The frames technology not being a blackhat SEO by itself still can hurt your rankings, because seach engines do not like frames, since they destroy the whole concept of the web - single page for single URL. With frames, one page may load and display the content from many other URLs which makes it very hard to crawl and index. Avoid using IFRAME and other associated tags unless you really, really have to and if you do - provide an alternative way to index the contents of each frame with direct links or use the NOFRAMES tag with some backup content shown to search engines.
8. JavaScript and Flash
Google can read both JS and Flash (well, its text part of course), but it is not recommended to build your site solely basing on these two. There should always be a way for a visitor (either human or bot) to read the content of a website with the simple plain text links. Do not rely exclusively on JS or Flash navigation - this will kill your SEO perspectives as quickly as the headshot.
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3.1.5. On-page factors summary
Well, if you've read carefully the above parts you already can figure out the summary yourself. Content is the king, but only a quality one is. Do not try to trick or cheat with search engines as this only works on the short run and it is always just a matter of time when your rankings get dropped forever. Providing high-quality relevant content interesting both for you and your visitors is the key to on-page ranking success and (paradoxically!) a half of the way to the success with off-page ranking factors.
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3.2. Off-page ranking factors
3.2.1. What is it?
At the end of XX-th century search engines ranked websites basing solely on their content. The situation has changed after the Google triumph. Google's algos were based on the link popularity, not only the content of websites. So, the more inbound links a website had, the higher it was ranked by Google. The whole concept didn't change very much from those days - popular websites often get linked to, so this factor is applied for calculating web rankings alongside with the content of such websites. In present days it is possible to rank for some keyword even if a website does not contain that keyword in its text! (the proof link)
Needles to say that you should pay an attention to off-page ranking factors as much as you do for on-page optimization. This SEO tutorial describes all the things you should keep in mind while maintaining your inbound links. Read along.
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3.2.2. PageRank
In the first hand, we must separate two things: the real PageRank and the PageRank green bar shown in Google Toolbar and other online and offline PageRank tools. The Google bar PageRank (I'll be calling it the green PageRank, or gPR) is merely an indicator. The real PageRank of a website (I'll be calling it the PageRank, or PR from now) is a mathematical value reflecting the probability of a visitor randomly following the links on websites to open this particular website. The value of 1 means 100% probability, that is a visitor randomly surfing the web will always open the website. Sooner or later. On the opposite, the value of 0 means that a random visitor never comes to that particular website through a link on some other site.
I won't get deep into mathematics of the PageRank since this info can be easily found on the web. I'll only underscore the key moments of the PageRank statistical nature.
1. First of all, you must understand the following: the number of websites grows each day, while the overall PageRank value always stays the same: 1 (one). In other words, there is a 100% probability of the fact that a visitor opens SOME site on the web. But the odds of each particular website are going lower and lower every minute. If you have 3 apples and two of them are maggoty, what are your odds to take a good apple? They are 1/3 or 33%. If you have to choose one apple of 100 you only have 1% probability. That's the case with the PageRank - it lowers naturally every day.
2. Due to the pt.1 and the overall enormous number of indexed websites it is not possible to show the exact PageRank value every minute. That is why we need the green PageRank which is updated every 3 or 4 months and shows the PageRank value in a more comprehensible form: as a number from 0 to 10. This number correlates to the actual PageRank very little, it only shows the basic trends.
Also, the gPR scale is non-linear. One may think that a website with PR2 is two times more popular (or at least has two times more chances to get that random visitor we were talking about earlier) than its unlucky brother with PR1, but that is not true. In fact it is more likely to be that a PR2 website is 10 times more popular than PR1, but 10 times less popular than PR3. Something like this, but the number 10 is only an example here, since we don't know the exact formula.
3. The PageRank models a random user who is surfing the web and following random links on websites. From the practical point of view this means: the more links all over the web points to your website, the higher its PageRank is.
So, now you know that the key off-page ranking factor is the number of inbound links to a website and the green PageRank is the indirect indicator of that number. However, the PageRank mathematical mechanism considers only a quantity of links, while in fact there is also a quality factor. This is implemented via different filters and value dumping factors that Google applies to each link before including it into the PageRank calculation.
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3.2.3. Important stuff
This part describes the crucial off-page ranking factors you should always pay attention to.
1. The theme of the linking website
This one is very important since the links from a relevant website are worth much more. On your link building efforts, try searching the websites that are close or at least similar to your own site theme. Though having a link from the unrelated site is not bad by itself and even Google admits that a webmaster doesn't have a full control on who and how links to its website. Nevertheless, avoid links from unrelated websites or sites with illegal or unethical content (porn, malware etc).
2. The theme of websites you link to
On the other hand, you have a full control of the links placed on YOUR own website so if you link to some unrelated website - it is you who is responsible for that and it is your site that will be penalized. So be careful what sites you link to. Linking to some unrelated content not necessarily leads to a penalty, but anyways you should be cautious and link only to quality websites.
3. Anchor text
The anchor text of the inbound link is very important and if you can adjust it - try to squeeze all out of it. First of all, avoid using the same anchor text all over the links. Use synonyms, paraphrases, different keywords, whatever else. Second, put the important keywords in the beginning of the anchor text. Finally, do not put all of your keywords into the link. There is really no reason to use anchor text longer than 50-55 characters or 10-12 words. Keep it short.
4. Landing pages
This factor is often ignored even by some professional SEOs and webmasters. It is not enough to simply have a link to your site! The link must be a) relevant; and b) quality. And you must be sure that both websites - the linking and the linked - qualify to these requirements. As for the theme of the linking website - see the pt.1. But the theme of your website should also be quality and relevant both to the donor website and to the anchor text of the link.
Well, it is not necessary in fact, but it helps a lot to have a properly optimized landing pages for every link you have. What this "proper optimization" includes?
* The landing page must include keywords mentioned in anchor text in its content;
* The keywords should appear in all important places like the title tag, the headings etc;
* The overall topic of the page must match to those keywords.
If a landing page qualifies to all of these - it gets significant boost to its rank, because the corresponding inbound links get much more value now.
5. PageRank
The PageRank doesn't do anything by itself and the green PageRank does even less - it is simply an EGO-meter. However, the PR of the linking website (or a candidate) gives you an approximation of what the link from this website is worth, what value it has. Also, high-PR website are considered as trusted and gets some more value from Google. See below for more trust-factors.
A single link from a PR10 website (if you somehow manage to have one, of course) will quickly boost your own website PR to 7 or even 8 giving you the comparable boost in your search positions. But this factor is the last in the list of important off-page factors, because at first hand you should find a relevant and quality website that is willing to put a link to you and then (only then!) check its PageRank. Exactly in that order. Because quality content is worth more than high PageRank.
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3.2.4. Helpful stuff
1. Reciprocal linking
1. The basic reciprocal linking is very simple: site A links to site B while site B links to site A.
Reciprocal links. Scheme A to B, B to A
There are other schemes though:
2. Cross linking. Site A links to site B from page A1, while site B links to site A from page B1.
Reciprocal links. Scheme A to B, B to A
3. Circular linking. Site A links to site B, site B links to site C,... site Z links to site A.
Reciprocal links. Circular links.
4. Three-in-a-row linking. Site A links to site B, site B links to site C. No link back from C.
Reciprocal links. Three-in-a-row links.
5. Combined.
Reciprocal links. Combined scheme.
There is a strong misbelief that reciprocal linking does not work anymore. That's not true. It does work, but the efficiency of this method is much much lower than it was in 2003. In 2009 Google greatly reduces the value of reciprocal links, especially for the schemes a and c, but the whole concept still works and really helps to gain rankings on early and middle stages of SEO promotion when literally every link counts.
Though there are some exclusions (as always however). Needless to say that you still have to choose the partners for reciprocal linking very carefully. Consider the theme of the linking website, its quality, its neighbourhood (other sites it links to), consider the page that would point to your site, pay attention to the anchor text of the link etc. You don't want to exchange links with spammy websites, or websites that use e-mail spam to suggest the partnership. You don't want a link buried 17 clicks away from the homepage.
Usually you don't want a nofollow link, but even a nofollow link from a relevant site can bring a load of target visitors to your site so it is up to you to decide whether it is only the link juice that you expect from the link exchange, or the auditory too. By the way, you also don't want a link from a page already having 50+ links on it. And the final yet still important note: do not e-mail website owners all over the web with link exchange proposal! That sucks, man, and no one answers anyway, while you will put your karma down to zero with such activity and possibly will receive a penalty from SpamCop or some other paranoid bastards. Don't do that, I tell you.
2. Web directories
One more technique that everyone tells it doesn't work anymore. Well, to be honest the efficiency of web directories never was so amazing. In fact there is only one web directory you certainly want to be included into: Google's Open Directory (or DMOZ). Google Directory is a free, human-edited web directory of high value. It is a bit tricky to get included into it, because it often takes months before your submission will be approved (if it ever will), but the game worths the candle - a link from DMOZ is a significant boost to your website value and a drop of life-giving link juice too.
If you have some free funds to spend, you may also want to be included into several paid inclusion directories, starting from Yahoo Directory which seems to be the most respectful of them. Also, here is a great article on directory submission you should definitely read. Don't miss the outstanding list of directories to submit too.
3. Social bookmarks
They used to work very well, but due to enormous amounts of spam on the social bookmarking websites the method is not as efficient as it were 2-3 years ago. Promoting a website through the social bookmarking websites has its pros and cons:
1. Pro: SB websites get crawled very frequently - every 2 or 3 hours. This means if you manage to get there you will get your piece of traffic from search engines pretty soon.
2. Pro: Social bookmarks not only help you raise your link strength, but also bring some amont of pure traffic from the bookmarking sites themselves. Depending on the popularity of the article posted on SB the traffic to your website could vary from few grains of sand to a pure avalanche.
3. Con: Unfortunately, you cannot simply bookmark a link to your website and wait for traffic. This could have worked in the first days of social bookmarking, but now it does not. First, the amount of posts (diggs, reddits, stumbles etc) per minute does not leave many chances to each particluar post to get popular. Your bookmark simply may lost between hundreds of thousands others. Second, bookmarking websites often have either moderators or some way for other users to disapprove an inappropriate post or a bookmark. So if you post a bookmark of your own website, the link is deleted and your account is banned. Too bad.
There are some workarounds for this though.
* The whitehat one. Post an article or some other valuable (do you hear me? I said valuable!) content on your website and wait until someone else links to it. Then you should bookmark that site instead. This won't increase your link popularity or PageRank, but still bring you visitors. Oh, did I forgot to tell that the other linking site could be yours too? So you may have a commercial website with the article and a non-commercial blog where you mention that commercial article. Or even you may have another blog where you mention the blog that mentions the commercial article (in the house that Jack built).
* The blackhat one. Create as many fake accounts as you need to promote your bookmark on every social bookmark site. Getting tough now since the method has been revealed ages ago and now SB websites are highly loaded with such spam already.
4. Con: One more bad thing about social bookmarks is: they tend to work for a limited period of time. They bring you a splash of traffic in the short term, but then they simply deplete and only give few visits a week. On the other hand, even few visits still's more than no visits at all.
5. Con: And the worst thing about social bookmarking is the quality of the traffic they produce. The traffic of a social bookmarking website is not targeted well, it is based on the impulse of curiosity, not on the intent. This means that you will (or will not - see above) receive a large load of traffic, but if you manage to convert merely 1% of it to customers you can congratulate yourself - you've done a good job! The conversion rate for this type of traffic is extremely low so this recipe only works well for a limited class of websites and products. Though it is still good if you want to build a community or simply need many people on your website for some reason (AdSense and so on).
4. Trust factors
A bunch of ranking factors that you only have a limited control of. Each of such factors does not add a value directly to the rank of a website. Instead, they increase its trust rating. Google (and other search engines too) prefers trusted websites and gives a boost to their ranking. Trust factors include:
1. Domain name age. Old websites seem more trustworthy than others. If the domain didn't change its owner - it gets even more trust points (though don't ask how many).
2. The number and quality of inbound links, the PageRank. If many other websites link to this one - it is considered trustworthy. The quality of links doesn't play a significant role though, since you cannot be responsible for the links pointing to your website as you got no any control on that. Otherwise it would be possible to hurt your competitors by posting links to them from some malware sites.
3. Website content. If a website uses pop-ups, pop-unders or some of the blackhat SEO methods - its trust rating gets lower.
4. Outbound links. If a website links to other trustworthy sites it gets a boost to its own trust rating.
I believe there are more, but these ones are the most important.
5. Press releases, related resources, word of mouth etc.
That's a bit off SEO theme, but still can help to obtain a couple of links. You have some exclusive info? Share it with the community on some thematic resource. Do you have some astonishing news in your industry? Tell the world about it with a press release. Are you running a special promo action or offering a discount coupon? Let others know about it.
All of these usually doesn't require a single cent from you. You can send a press release via PRWeb, you can register on some forums within your industry for free to share your thoughts, you can tell others of your promo coupons at Giveaway of the Day or RetailMeNot and other similar sites. Don't neglect the power of word of mouth!
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3.2.5. Useless stuff
These off-page ranking factors do not work any more (some - never did) or their value is neglible tiny.
1. Many links pointing to the same page
If a page has several links pointing to the same URL this won't give any additional SEO value, since Google only considers the very first link on the page. From the on-page optimization point this means you want to put your navigation menu links somewhere near the end of your HTML source. From the off-page point this means that you need only one link from one URL, because anyways only the first one counts.
Moreover, it even may hurt a bit. Let's suppose there is an external page that has 3 links in total, one of them points to your site. This would mean that one third of the overall link juice of that page flows into your website. Let's imagine then that you asked a webmaster to put one more link to your site to that page. So now it has 4 links, while two of them point to your site. So the link juice is now divided into 4 parts instead of 3, but hey! - the second inbound link from that page is not considered anyway, so in that case you are getting even less link juice than you did before!
2. Nofollow links
The SEO value of nofollow links is close to zero as they doesn't pass the PageRank and the link juice doesn't flow through them too. However, the link is always a link. Would you decline a nofollow link from the homepage of Google? This link would not give you any SEO value, but the traffic stream it would generate could smash up any dam.
3. Links in signature
Forum post signature is a popular place for links, but the SEO value of such method is extremely low. The fact is that nobody reads your signature unless you become a significant figure in that community and even then the signature links are not worth much. How many times have you opened someone's signature link yourself?
The direct SEO impact of such links is also tiny - the links are usually nofollow and even if they dofollow, they still buried in the depths of forum topics. The amount of the link juice you could obtain through them does not worth to be mentioned.
Does this mean "forget links in signature"? No. If you managed to become a part of the community and got some authority there, every spoken word of you (and your signature links as well) would attract the attention of the whole community. It needs time and efforts for sure, but there is no such thing as free lunch you know.
4. Guestbook links
The old as hell technique that never worked.
5. Blog comment links
Do not post comments to a blog for the only sake of the link. First, this is SPAM. Second, this doesn't work anyway. Third, most blogs have nofollow links in the comment so don't waste your time on something that doesn't help you, but pisses off all other people at the same time.
6. No-PR links
The amount of link juice that no-PR link has is utterly small and what is more important the trust rating it passes to the linked sites is small as well. This means that it is crucial to obtain links from high PageRank sites. Wasting your time on PR0 or no-PR sites is not worth the candles, because you need a bulk load of such links for the changes in your website rankings that you'll probably not even notice.
The PageRank by itself (as stated in the above sections) does not directly affect the position of your website, but it does affect the trust rating of other sites that link to you. Since you want links from trusted websites in the first hand, you should prefer high-PR links before all others.
7. Article submission
This one often occurs in many SEO FAQs and guides all over the web: write an article and submit it to article websites. That doesn't work. Well, ok, may be it used to work in the past, but now it doesn't. What is an article? It is a piece of useful text interesting to its readers. Now imagine a guy that is interested in reading 100.000+ very similar articles on some article website. You can't? What's the problem? The problem is: such guy never existed. Nobody wants to read an article made from the parts of another ten articles each of those in their turn was constructed from some initial article written in early 2003 with a keyword synonyms auto-replace software. Who wants to read those articles? Who wants to link to their authors? Nobody.
Surely, articles are good and you defintely want to write some. But submitting them to article websites is useless. Try applying some link bait instead.
8. Submitting your site to Google
Useless, because if you have some inbound links it crawls you anyway, and if you don't - ther's no difference whether you submitted the site to Google or not - it won't show up in SERPs. Though you may need this if your site has been excluded from the index for some reason (usually for some black hat SEO) - to include it back when you fixed the issue.
How Do I Build the Perfectly Optimized Page?
If you're in SEO, you probably hear this question a lot. Sadly, there's no cut and dry answer, but there are sets of best practices we can draw from and sharpen to help get close. In this blog post, I'm going to share our top recommendations for achieving on-page, keyword-targeting "perfection," or, at least, close to it. Some of these are backed by data points, correlation studies and extensive testing while others are simply gut-feelings based on experience. As with all things SEO, we recommend constant testing and refinement, though this knowledge can help you kick-start the process.
HTML Head Tags
*
Title - the most important of on-page keyword elements, the page title should preferably employ the keyword term/phrase as the first word(s). In our correlation data studies, the following graph emerged:
*
Clearly, using the keyword term/phrase as the very first words in the page title has the highest correlation with high rankings, and subsequent positions correlate nearly flawlessly to lower rankings.
* Meta Description - although not used for "rankings" by any of the major engines, the meta description is an important place to use the target term/phrase due to the "bolding" that occurs in the visual snippet of the search results. Usage has also been shown to help boost click-through rate, thus increasing the traffic derived from any ranking position.
* Meta Keywords - Yahoo! is unique among the search engines in recording and utilizing the meta keyword tag for discovery, though not technically for rankings. However, with Microsoft's Bing set to take over Yahoo! Search, the last remaining reason to employ the tag is now gone. That, combined with the danger of using keywords there for competitive research means that at SEOmoz, we never recommend employing the tag.
* Meta Robots - although not necessary, this tag should be sure NOT to contain any directives that could potentially disallow access by the engines.
* Rel="Canonical" - the larger and more complex a site (and the larger/more complex the organization working on it), the more we advise employing the canonical URL tag to prevent any potential duplicates or unintentional, appended URL strings from creating a problem for the engines and splitting up potential link juice.
* Other Meta Tags - meta tags like those offered by the DCMI or FGDC seem compelling, but currently provide no benefit for SEO with the major engines and thus, add unnecessary complexity and download time.
URL
* Length - Shorter URLs appear to perform better in the search results and are more likely to be copied/pasted by other sites, shared and linked-to.
* Keyword Location - The closer the targeted keyword(s) are to the domain name, the better. Thus, site.com/keyword outperforms site.com/folder/subfolder/keyword and is the most recommended method of optimization (though this is certainly not a massive rankings benefit)
* Subdomains vs. Pages - As we've talked about previously on the blog, despite the slight URL benefit that subdomains keyword usage has over subfolders or pages, the engines' link popularity assignment algorithms tilt the balance in favor of subfolders/pages rather than subdomains.
* Word Separators - Hyphens are still the king of keyword separators in URLs, and despite promises that underscores will be given equal credit, the inconsistency with other methods make the hyphen a clear choice. NOTE: This should not apply to root domain names, where separating words with hyphens is almost never recommended (e.g. pinkgrapefruit.com is a far better choice than pink-grapefruit.com).
Body Tags
* Number of Keyword Repetitions - It's impossible to pinpoint the exact, optimal number of times to employ a keyword term/phrase on the page, but this simple rule has served us well for a long time - "2-3X on short pages, 4-6X on longer ones and never more than makes sense in the context of the copy." The added benefit of another instance of a term is so miniscule that it seems unwise to ever be aggressive with this metric.
* Keyword Density - A complete myth as an algorithmic component, keyword density nonetheless pervades even very sharp SEO minds. While it's true that more usage of a keyword term/phrase can potentially improve targeting/ranking, there's no doubt that keyword density has never been the formula by which this relevance was measured.
* Keyword Usage Variations - Long suspected to influence search engine rankings (though never studied in a depth of detail that's convincing to me), the theory that varied keyword usage throughout a page can help with content optimization and optimization nevertheless is worth a small amount of effort. We recommend employing at least one or two variations of a term and potentially splitting up keyword phrases and using them in body copy as well or instead.
* H1 Headline - The H1 tag has long been thought to have great importance in on-page optimization. Recent correlation data from our studies, however, has shown that it has a very low correlation with high rankings (close to zero, in fact). While this is compelling evidence, correlation is not causation and for semantic and SEO reasons, we still advise proper use of the H1 tag as the headline of the page and, preferrably, employment of the targeted keyword term/phrase.
* H2/H3/H4/Hx - Even lower in importance than the H1, our recommendation is to apply only if required. These tags appears to carry little to no SEO value.
* Alt Attribute - Surprisingly, the alt attribute, long thought to carry little SEO weight, was shown to have quite a robust correlation with high rankings in our studies. Thus, we strongly advise the use of a graphic image/photo/illustration on important keyword-targeted pages with the term/phrase employed in the alt attribute of the img tag.
* Image Filename - Since image traffic can be a substantive source of visits and image filenames appear to be valuable for this as well as natural web search, we suggest using the keyword term/phrase as the name of the image file employed on the page.
* Bold/Strong - Using a keyword in bold/strong appears to carry a very, very tiny amount of SEO weight, and thus it's suggested as a best practice to use the targeted term/phrase at least once in bold, though a very minor one.
* Italtic/Emphasized - Surprisingly, italic/emphasized text appears to have a similar to slightly higher correlation with high rankings than bold/strong and thus, we suggest its use on the targeted keyword term/phrase in the text.
* Internal Link Anchors - No testing has yet found that internal anchors are picked up/counted by the engines.
* HTML Comments - As above, it appears the engines ignore text in comments.
Internal Links & Location in Site Architecture
* Click-Depth - Our general recommendation is that the more competitive and challenging a keyword term/phrase is to rank for, the higher it should be in a site's internal architecture (and thus, the fewer clicks from the home page it should take to reach that URL).
* Number/Percentage of Internal Links - More linked-to pages tend to higher rankings and thus, for competitive terms, it may help to link to these pages from a greater number/percentage of pages on a site.
* Links in Content vs. Permanent Navigation - It appears that Google and the other engines are doing more to recognize location on the page as an element of link consideration. Thus, employing links to pages in the Wikipedia-style (in the body content of a piece) rather than in permanent navigation may potentially provide some benefit. Don't forget, however, that Google only counts the first link to a page that they see in the HTML
* Link Location in Sidebars & Footers - Recent patent applications, search papers and experience from inside SEOmoz and many practitioners externally suggests that Google may be strongly discounting links placed in the footer, and, to a lesser degree, in the sidebar(s) of pages. Thus, if you're employing a link in permanent navigation, it may pay to use the top navigation (above the content) for SEO purposes.
Page Architecture
* Keyword Location - We advise that important keywords should, preferably, be featured in the first few words (50-100, but hopefully even sooner) of a page's text content. The engines do appear to have some preference for pages that employ keywords sooner, rather than later, in the text.
* Content Structure - Some practitioners swear by the use of particular content formats (introduction, body, examples, conclusion OR the journalistic style of narrative, data, conclusion, parable) for SEO, but we haven't seen any formal data suggesting these are valuable for higher rankings and thus feel that whatever works best for the content and the visitors is likely ideal.
Why Don't We Always Obey These Rules?
That answer is relatively easy. The truth is that in the process of producing great web content, we sometimes forget, sometimes ignore and sometimes intentionally disobey the best practices laid out above. On-page optimization, while certainly important, is only one piece of a larger rankings puzzle:
It most certainly pays to get the on-page, keyword-targeting pieces right, but on-page SEO, in my opinion, follows the 80/20 rule very closely. If you get the top 20% of the most important pieces (titles, URLs, internal links) from the list above right, you'll get 80% (maybe more) of the value possible in the on-page equation.
Best Practices for Ranking #1
Curiously, though perhaps not entirely surprisingly to experienced SEOs, the truth is that on-page optimization doesn't necessarily rank first in the quest for top rankings. In fact, a list that walks through the process of actually getting that first position would look something more like:
1. Accessibility - content engines can't see or access cannot even be indexed; thus crawl-ability is foremost on this list.
2. Content - you need to have compelling, high quality material that not only attracts interest, but compels visitors to share the information. Virality of content is possibly the most important/valuable factor in the ranking equation because it will produce the highest link conversion rate (the ratio of those who visit to those who link after viewing).
3. Basic On-Page Elements - getting the keyword targeting right in the most important elements (titles, URLs, internal links) provides a big boost in the potential ability of a page to perform well.
4. User Experience - the usability, user interface and overall experience provided by a website strongly influences the links and citations it earns as well as the conversion rate and browse rate of the traffic that visits.
5. Marketing - I like to say that "great content is no substitute for great marketing." A terrific marketing machine or powerful campaign has the power to attract far more links than content may "deserve," and though this might seem unfair, it's a principle on which all of capitalism has functioned for the last few hundred years. Spreading the word is often just as important (or more so) than being right, being honest or being valuable (just look at the political spectrum).
6. Advanced/Thorough On-Page Optimization - applying all of the above with careful attention to detail certainly isn't useless, but it is, for better or worse, at the bottom of this list for a reason; in our experience, it doesn't add as much value as the other techniques described.
