Search Engine Optimization - Domains & Websites
Below is a list of great things to consider when building your website. Everything from what domian name should i use to how we name our files and folders for optimum SEO.
Good SEO Domain & Web Practices
Keyword-rich URLs and filenames
A very important factor, especially for Yahoo! and Bing.
SEO WEIGHT FACTOR +3
Site Accessibility
Another fundamental issue, which that is often
neglected. If the site (or separate pages) is unaccessible because of
broken links, 404 errors, password-protected areas and other similar
reasons, then the site simply can't be indexed.
SEO WEIGHT FACTOR +3
XML Sitemap
It is great to have a complete and up-to-date sitemap,
spiders love it, no matter if it is a plain old HTML sitemap or the
special Google sitemap format.
SEO WEIGHT FACTOR +2
Site size
Spiders love large sites, so generally it is the bigger,
the better. However, big sites become user-unfriendly and difficult to
navigate, so sometimes it makes sense to separate a big site into a
couple of smaller ones. On the other hand, there are hardly sites that
are penalized because they are 10,000+ pages, so don't split your size
in pieces only because it is getting larger and larger.
SEO WEIGHT FACTOR +2
Site age
Similarly to wine, older sites are respected more. The
idea is that an old, established site is more trustworthy (they have
been around and are here to stay) than a new site that has just poped up
and might soon disappear. However it appears that in Googles case the new Caffiene crawler will weight this factor far less. We wil have to wait and see, but this seems to be the general concensious across SEO circles.
SEO WEIGHT FACTOR +2
Site theme
It is not only keywords in URLs and on page that matter.
The site theme is even more important for good ranking because when the
site fits into one theme, this boosts the rankings of all its pages that
are related to this theme
SEO WEIGHT FACTOR +2
File Location on Site
File location is important and files that are located in
the root directory or near it tend to rank better than files that are
buried 5 or more levels below.
SEO WEIGHT FACTOR +1
Domains versus subdomains, separate domains
Having a separate domain is better – i.e. instead of
having blablabla.blogspot.com, register a separate blablabla.com domain.
SEO WEIGHT FACTOR +1
Top-level domains (TLDs)
Not all TLDs are equal. There are TLDs that are better
than others. For instance, the most popular TLD – .com – is much better
than .ws, .biz, or .info domains but (all equal) nothing beats an old
.edu or .org domain.
SEO WEIGHT FACTOR +1
Hyphens in URLs
Hyphens between the words in an URL increase readability
and help with SEO rankings. This applies both to hyphens in domain names
and in the rest of the URL.
SEO WEIGHT FACTOR +1
URL length
Generally doesn't matter but if it is a very long URL-s,
this starts to look spammy, so avoid having more than 10 words in the
URL (3 or 4 for the domain name itself and 6 or 7 for the rest of
address is acceptable).
SEO WEIGHT FACTOR 0
IP address
Could matter only for shared hosting or when a site is
hosted with a free hosting provider, when the IP or the whole C-class of
IP addresses is blacklisted due to spamming or other illegal practices.
SEO WEIGHT FACTOR 0
Adwords will boost your ranking
Similarly to Adsense, Adwords has nothing to do with
your search rankings. Adwords will bring more traffic to your site but
this will not affect your rankings in whatsoever way.
SEO WEIGHT FACTOR 0
Hosting downtime
Hosting downtime is directly related to accessibility
because if a site is frequently down, it can't be indexed. But in
practice this is a factor only if your hosting provider is really
unreliable and has less than 97-98% uptime.
SEO WEIGHT FACTOR -1
Dynamic URLs
Spiders prefer static URLs, though you will see many dynamic pages on top positions. Long dynamic URLs (over 100 characters) are really bad and in any case you'd better use a tool to rewrite dynamic URLs in something more human- and SEO-friendly.
SEO WEIGHT FACTOR -1
Session IDs
This is even worse than dynamic URLs. Don't use session IDs for information that you'd like to be indexed by spiders.
SEO WEIGHT FACTOR -2
Bans in robots.txt
If indexing of a considerable portion of the site is
banned, this is likely to affect the nonbanned part as well because
spiders will come less frequently to a “noindex” site.
SEO WEIGHT FACTOR -2
Redirects (301 and 302)
When not applied properly, redirects can hurt a lot –
the target page might not open, or worse – a redirect can be regarded as
a black hat technique, when the visitor is immediately taken to a
different page.
SEO WEIGHT FACTOR -3
